I can't help but feel that iOS would have crushed Android in the United States precisely because of its superior software catalog and attention to design, if only it had been available outside of AT&T's walls.
Where Are the Android Killer Apps?
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Re: Where Are the Android Killer Apps?
#22"If quantity of app titles were all that mattered, we’d all be using Windows, not Mac OS X, right?" Err... Wait, are we all using Mac OS X?
His logic is sound, but you're misreading him: he's saying that (quantity of app titles all that matters) => (we're all using windows). We're not all using windows, so by contradiction quantity of apps is not all that matters. He's not saying that everybody is using OS X, just that not everybody is using windows.
Re: Where Are the Android Killer Apps?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you see this part at the end, and if so, does that affect your judgement? > A final thought, regarding Android’s relative weakness as a software platform. iOS’s exclusivity for a bunch of big-name mobile games — Need for Speed Undercover, Star Wars: Battle for Hoth, Monopoly, Tetris, The Sims, Assassin’s Creed — has been broken. Not by Android, where none of these games exist, but by Windows Phone 7, a one-month-…
Windows paid for all these companies to create the games. They funded the development - that's the only reason why.
So, why doesn't Google fund those same players? There must be a value judgement there because I gotta assume Google thought of that as an option.
Re: Where Are the Android Killer Apps?
#24Funny, my impression is that all the useful apps tend to be on Android. For example, I use Google Talk a lot, as it saves costs for sending SMS. I keep begging my iPhone 4 friend to use it, but he never even comments. I am not sure if it is not available on iPhone (multitasking problem?), or if he just doesn't care enough. Alternatively Twitter DMs are free, too. What am I missing out on by staying on Android (except…
Well, the games are pretty big. I don't play any PC or Console games but I've somehow amassed about 30 games on my iPhone, very few on my Nexus One though.
Apart from that though, what I miss from the iPhone when I'm using my Android phone are OmniFocus, GoodReader/iBooks (I haven't found an Android PDF reader that comes close), GuitarToolkit, TabTookit, OmniTuner, MobileRSS (again, haven't found a close competitor on Android) and Hipstamatic.
Re: Where Are the Android Killer Apps?
#25Re: Where Are the Android Killer Apps?
#26I can't help but feel that iOS would have crushed Android in the United States precisely because of its superior software catalog and attention to design, if only it had been available outside of AT&T's walls.
Perhaps. But a large part of the iPhone's "attention to design" is lack of carrier-mandated crapware, which is why it's not available on Verizon. Similarly, the average quality of Android phones would go up substantially if the carriers would stop crippling them, but that's the price Google had to pay to get the carriers to support them at all.
Re: Where Are the Android Killer Apps?
#27So he is asking, where are the apps that are available for Android, but not iPhone that meet the following criteria
1. Not made by Google or built-in
2. Popular and well made (no long tail)
3. Don't take advantage of things Android can do but iPhone can't (home screens, notifications, deep integration, background services, etc.)
Suppose you had such an app, or were developing one. While Android has passed iOS in new phones sold, it's still catching up on existing userbase. Why wouldn't you have an iPhone version too, since by definition your app already would run fine there?
Re: Where Are the Android Killer Apps?
#28Gruber seems to make the assertion that a platform only has worth based on its exclusive "killer apps". He goes wrong there and never really recovers. Android's strength is not its suite apps, it's its flexibility. It runs on an enormous range of hardware, and doesn't require that you buy into a single vendor's toolchain to use it. The core philosophical difference between the two platforms is "Steve Jobs decides wha…
But you have to admit, there's a cultural divide between Android and iOS. Android is extremely well suited for working, passing data seamlessly between applications, etc. It makes it easy to get things done in the same way you might interact with a desktop computer.
iOS, however, takes a different tack, focusing on self-contained, bite-sized apps. You hop into something, use it, then leave. And when you're in that app, it completely owns the experience. In that world, things like intents, task killers, and filesystem browsers just don't make sense. Which almost by definition precludes things like Chrome-to-Phone or Swype.
In that way, I see Android and iOS relating very similarly to Windows and OS X. "Beautiful" simply isn't part of the Windows application lexicon, and yet, it's used frequently in reviews of OS X software, along with terms like "polished," "lovely," "stunning," and "gorgeous."
What allows OS X to have beautiful apps? What's preventing Windows from having beautiful applications? And are those same factors at work in Android and iOS?
Re: Where Are the Android Killer Apps?
#29There is a killer app for me: Tasker (http://tasker.dinglisch.net/).
Being able to set up different configurations of my phone based on where I am, what time it is, what apps I'm running is very useful.
Re: Where Are the Android Killer Apps?
#30Funny, my impression is that all the useful apps tend to be on Android. For example, I use Google Talk a lot, as it saves costs for sending SMS. I keep begging my iPhone 4 friend to use it, but he never even comments. I am not sure if it is not available on iPhone (multitasking problem?), or if he just doesn't care enough. Alternatively Twitter DMs are free, too. What am I missing out on by staying on Android (except…
I used to use Google Talk a lot. On the desktop it's handy. On my Android phone (HTC Desire) it seemed to work well.
Since getting an iPhone 4 however I've pretty much stopped using it entirely. I simply cannot find a good app for it. The ones I have found seem to sign out after 4 hours (making them useless) or just don't seem to work reliably (eg I'd get home and find a message on my desktop that hadn't made it to my phone). So I had to give it up.
Your intended use case was the same as mine: lime SMS. But the fact that it works (or seems to at least) on Android doesn't make it a killer app for Android. It simply is a nail in the coffin for Google Talk.
Messaging is something that needs to be ubiquitous. IM had this problem (eg some people were on MSN, others on AIM). It's why SMS is such a success. Google Talk is already limited to those who use gmail. Further limiting it to those with Android handsets makes it much less useful.