We Need to Talk About Android • Hacker News Board

Re: We Need to Talk About Android

#21

Post by thought_alarm » Wed, Mar 07, 2012, 4:11 AM UTC

You are not Samsung's customer.

Phone manufactures sell phones to carriers, not consumers. Success in the phone industry depends entirely how well you meet the demands of the carriers. RIM knows it (or knew it), Nokia knows it, Samsung knows it.

Android is merely a platform that allows Samsung to tailor their devices to the carrier's requirements, in a way they couldn't do when they were selling Windows Mobile devices.

So how does Android 4 help Samsung better meet the demands of the carriers?

It doesn't. Carriers want devices that show off their network, they want devices that compare well against the iPhone, and they want you to buy a new phone and sign a new contract in 2 years. They obviously have no trouble selling Samsung devices with outdated software to the unsuspecting public; it made Samsung the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world.

Neither the carriers nor the manufacturers will spend a dime to rush out Android 4.

Re: We Need to Talk About Android

#22

Post by ktizo » Wed, Mar 07, 2012, 4:18 AM UTC

How does having consumer level devices deployed to a school help educate people at all, regardless of things like platform fragmentation?

Re: We Need to Talk About Android

#23

Post by CoffeeDregs » Wed, Mar 07, 2012, 4:22 AM UTC

eykanal wrote: post #13

shingen wrote: post #3

The 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…

There's an excellent line in the middle of the Android Support Visualization article he links to ( http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphan... ): "In other words, Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one." 85% i…

    >85% is good enough to have someone buy your crap, 
    >but it's not enough to make them loyal to your crap.

I get tired of the fanboistic comments in a lot of these threads. There is a big, strategic, complex, technology game going on and, apparently, a bunch of smart hackers think phones are like simple breakfast cereals (and even those aren't simple).

A big battle is afoot. Act like it. Stop pretending that one side wears white and the other wears black. I always hated Microsoft's products (aging myself: I used OS/2), but they understood the game that was afoot. I'm not anti-Apple. I'm anti-blinders and so many of my friends who use Apple products seem to employ them...

To their credit and only in limited ways are Apple finally acknowledging that network effects are important. But they're doing so in a world quite different than the one in which Microsoft thrived. As I said, I hated Microsoft's strategies, so I hope Apple will not emulate them too closely.

EDIT: I appreciate the lack of downvotes... I was hesitant to write such an opinionated bit, but was frustrated.

Re: We Need to Talk About Android

#24

Post by padobson » Wed, Mar 07, 2012, 4:26 AM UTC

From the perspective of an app developer, I was motivated to build Android apps by the section about lack of quality apps. It seems the Android app market is bigger, has fewer barriers to entry, and is more easily penetrated because of lacking quality competition.

Re: We Need to Talk About Android

#25

Post by nirvdrum » Wed, Mar 07, 2012, 4:29 AM UTC

elithrar wrote: post #12

shingen wrote: post #3

The 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…

> Circa 2002 they had '95, 98, ME, and XP spread across over half a billion units. With further varied patch configurations and service packs. It's worth pointing out that this comparison isn't the same. You could, in 2002, run the latest version of Office on all of their operating systems. With Android, there are situations where even Google's own software (see Chrome on Android) only runs on the absolute latest ver…

To be fair, when iMovie launched (an Apple app) it only worked on the brand new iPhone 4. If you had a 3GS (i.e., hadn't upgraded yet), you were out of luck. It didn't matter that you had the latest iOS. You didn't have the latest hardware so you couldn't run it, although oddly you accidentally buy it through the app store.

Re: We Need to Talk About Android

#26

Post by erohead » Wed, Mar 07, 2012, 4:31 AM UTC

tomschlick wrote: post #7

A 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…

Buy a nexus phone?

Re: We Need to Talk About Android

#27

Post by dman » Wed, Mar 07, 2012, 4:34 AM UTC

thought_alarm wrote: post #21

You are not Samsung's customer. Phone manufactures sell phones to carriers, not consumers. Success in the phone industry depends entirely how well you meet the demands of the carriers. RIM knows it (or knew it), Nokia knows it, Samsung knows it. Android is merely a platform that allows Samsung to tailor their devices to the carrier's requirements, in a way they couldn't do when they were selling Windows Mobile device…

Calling everyone one who buys a samsung device "unsuspecting public" is patronising. There are real reasons to buy a non apple device. I have listed some such reasons on an earlier thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642152 . I also managed to miss one important reason in that list - 4G.

Re: We Need to Talk About Android

#28

Post by siglesias » Wed, Mar 07, 2012, 4:44 AM UTC

shingen wrote: post #3

The 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…

Except that the refresh cycle for a mobile device is around two years, and word spreads more quickly than ever that you can't run the latest stuff. If that Android phone can't run the latest apps, lags, or can't do all the things that your friend's iPhone [1] can do, easily, and reliably, you're a lost customer. On the flip side, if you're a developer with limited resources and your app can't run on a vast majority of deployed devices without extensive and expensive testing, you're a lost developer. Neither of these things is good for a computing platform. Never was, never will be. These are first principles. Sure, there might be other factors, (which you haven't specified by the way), but all else equal users and developers want consistency in a platform for the sake of compatibility.

1) Top rated review for Path for Android: http://cl.ly/1P082D1L2D1k1O0i3K0J

Re: We Need to Talk About Android

#29

Post by andyfleming » Wed, Mar 07, 2012, 4:44 AM UTC

I've been dealing with the fragmentation issue directly as of recently. I was completely oblivious to the situation until I found out I needed to test for 4 versions of the Android OS for a project (after the fact)! No fun!

Re: We Need to Talk About Android

#30

Post by wmf » Wed, Mar 07, 2012, 4:51 AM UTC

beloch wrote: post #19

Google needs to do one thing before anything else: Build a reference phone chipset. Every Android phone consists of a patchwork of vendor specific hardware. The chips in Samsung's phones are not the same as the chips in HTC's or LG's, etc.. It gets even worse, since the same model of phone made by the same manufacturer may have different chips for different cell carriers. This is a big reason why the second most rece…

Google does have reference designs; if you use the same chips as the latest Nexus then you don't have to do any porting to get the latest Android release. This was especially apparent with Honeycomb where all the tablets used Tegra 2 (despite its tablet-unfriendly low fill rate). But unlike Microsoft's "chassis" concept, Google won't force anyone. It is open source after all. Also, Google likes to rotate their favor among all the chip and phone vendors, using a different vendor for each generation. Phone makers who are loyal to one SoC line find themselves advantaged with one release but disadvantaged with the next. As much as Android would benefit from Microsoft/Apple-style tighter control, Google seems philosophically opposed to it.