We Need to Talk About Android
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We Need to Talk About Android
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Re: We Need to Talk About Android
#2Theres a freaking "Apple distinguished educator" logo on the bottom. We need to talk about taking education, not brand loyality serious.
Re: We Need to Talk About Android
#3The endless parade of fragmentation discussions regarding Android all prove one thing: a lot of people don't understand what wins a market. Customers lacking in technological savvy make up the radical majority of Android owners, they are never going to care about this issue so long as their smart phone functions at 85% good enough.
85% good enough, is more than enough to win a market if you have substantial other advantages in your favor.
Windows has always suffered fragmentation, and has rarely been better than 85% good enough. Circa 2002 they had '95, 98, ME, and XP spread across over half a billion units. With further varied patch configurations and service packs. The total global varied combinations are in the hundreds in that context.
But, you say, that's just so horrible! Welcome to reality, where markets are never dominated by perfection and fairy tales. You don't have to like it, you can rail against it the rest of your life, and fight the good fight; and Android will continue to dominate, and it will have absolutely nothing to do with issues related to fragmentation.
Re: We Need to Talk About Android
#4Android 2.2+ is not that bad, feature-wise. And with the release of several compatibility packages, it's rather easy to make app that run on more than 90% of the available Android devices.
APIs haven't changed that much from 2.2 to 4.0, for the design you can easily implement your own, and with the introduction of Fragments it's even easier to make apps that look good on both phones and tablets for Android than for iOS.
Yes, you can't negate that Android has a fragmentation problem, but it's not as bad as it used to be, or most people would like you to believe.
Re: We Need to Talk About Android
#5I think by the end of the year this will be less of a problem. Consider that last year two OS versions were released and the first was Honeycomb which had a very binding legal agreement associated with it so as not to appear on phone form factor devices. Then Icecream Sandwich comes out and as usual most of the Android ecosystem does not see any of the codeline until the AOSP release. So now it's 3 months down the road.
In the biz. I haven't heard of any significant handset vendors starting a Android phone or tablet project in 2012 on anything but 4.0. So with the growth in the market expect 4.0 to grow very quickly and perhaps consider 2011 to be a oddity.
Re: We Need to Talk About Android
#6I think by the end of the year this will be less of a problem. Consider that last year two OS versions were released and the first was Honeycomb which had a very binding legal agreement associated with it so as not to appear on phone form factor devices. Then Icecream Sandwich comes out and as usual most of the Android ecosystem does not see any of the codeline until the AOSP release. So now it's 3 months down the ro…
How are we supposed to believe that the same phone manufacturers will not have the same problems with fragmentation with 4.0, 4.1, 4.x in the future?
Re: We Need to Talk About Android
#7A lot of the points made here are exactly why I'm going from an android device to an iPhone once my device cycle from Verizon is up later this year.
I'm so tired of hearing about all the new awesome things that are happening with the android operating system and not being able to get them. Even when my device (HTC Incredible) would support such features it's always a question of if HTC/Verizon is going to put in the effort to update the device because they have to update all of the modifications they have made on it. I feel that with android based devices, manufacturers and carriers just focus on the quantity of devices they produce not the quality of the service that is given. This is understandable because they have already made their money and they would rather sell you a new device than put in development time to upgrade your current device.
With an iOS device everyone gets the same updates at the same time as long as the hardware supports the software changes. You know the date you will get the update and you know the feature set you will have. This is because apple focuses on just a few devices and tries to make them really great. I think if HTC/Samsung/Motorola did the same with a stock android OS that got updated as soon as it was available from google they might have some of the same success.
For android to really succeed as a longterm platform I think google needs to crackdown and stop carriers from modifying the OS directly. If they want to "enhance" the OS with changes they should be downloaded in the form of applications when the phone is setup at the choice of the user.
Re: We Need to Talk About Android
#8> where are the apps to challenge iMovie, GarageBand, Keynote, OmniFocus
About GarageBand, there is a known problem with sound latency in android that prevents real time audio apps to be developed and it doesn't seem to be fixed in ICS.
This stops developers from writing musical apps that could compete with those available on iPhone or iPad.
iOS latency is around 6ms, in android devices it varies between 100ms and 400ms.
Re: We Need to Talk About Android
#9The endless parade of fragmentation discussions regarding Android all prove one thing: a lot of people don't understand what wins a market. Customers lacking in technological savvy make up the radical majority of Android owners, they are never going to care about this issue so long as their smart phone functions at 85% good enough. 85% good enough, is more than enough to win a market if you have substantial other adv…
Some of these issues are not immediately apparent but might be factors when you're buying your next device. Only time will tell.
Re: We Need to Talk About Android
#10The issue with backups is understated. Titanium Backup is a crutch where I expect a cloud solution from Google would have been obvious and easy to use.