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700,000 Android devices activated each day

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Re: 700,000 Android devices activated each day

#61

Post by discreteevent »

X-Istence wrote: post #27
psychotik wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. I wish they also included how many different variants of Android were actually being shipped, and what version each one was. _Those_ numbers would make us developers tremble. With iOS, it's simple -- if a million iOS devices were activated today, I'd know they all ran the exact same version of iOS 5.x, and none were customized or bastardized by OEMs. At least on that front, I'm thankful to Apple (I can write a…

I recently read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3362072 a post by user "calloc" which I find quite interesting. I personally work for Absio Corp ( http://absio.com/ ) and we do Android development for the DoD and we too have found many of the issues that I've mentioned above and that calloc has found as well. At the moment we are testing on the Evo 4G, Photon 4G, Samsung Galaxy S II, and the Droid X, with a…

Heh, maybe its fragmented android that will accelerate the dominance of the mobile web.

Re: 700,000 Android devices activated each day

#62

Post by masklinn »

thomasjoulin wrote: post #57
jlgosse wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to have to say that I've had a much better experience with iOS than any other platform. In the past three years I have moved in the following sequence: - Windows Mobile (Motorola Q) - Various BlackBerry Devices (Curve, Storm, Torch, etc) - Android (Nexus One) - Windows Phone 7 (Samsung Focus) - Android (Nexus One, again) + iPad 2 - iOS (iPhone 4S) Having dabbled in J2ME, BlackBerry, Android and iPhone developme…

I develop for iOS and WP7, and I have high hopes for Windows Phone, but honestly, it's not quite there yet. And compared to iOS development, it is extremely frustrating.

Could you expand on the differences you see? Is it API-wise? (I'd expect WP7 tooling to be better than iOS's, though I have not yet had the occasion to try Xcode 4 I kind-of doubt it leapfrogged VS2010, except on the UI side maybe where IB and bundles have always been pretty nice) Is it the communities/help around them? Third-party resources? Something else?

And which ecosystem did you come from before iOS and WP7?

(disclaimer: I'm not a Windows or WP7 dev, and I only dabbled a bit in iOS dev)

Re: 700,000 Android devices activated each day

#63

Post by codex »

Android is the new Nokia: the lowest common demonimator phone; the default. Or, to cross realms, it's the new Windows. While Apple costs carriers a pretty penny, carriers get a share of the advertising revenue from Android based web searches, and they can preinstall whatever carrier apps they want on their Android devices, unlike on the iPhone.

Re: 700,000 Android devices activated each day

#64

Post by RyanMcGreal »

ugh wrote: post #56
byoung2 wrote: post #2

I wonder what number of distinct users is. Once you go Android, you tend to stay there. Between my wife and me, for example, we have had 6 Android phones (1 HTC Hero, 2 HTC Evo 4Gs, 3 HTC Amaze 4Gs), and 5th Android tablet (2 Samsung Galaxy Tabs, 1 Asus Transformer, 1 Acer Iconia, and 1 T-Mobile G-Slate). I'm sure each activation was recorded, but there isn't really a way to deactivate a device. Even a factory reset…

It seems to me that Android would be the easiest to switch away from. Not so much for any technical reasons, rather because of the mindset most Android buyers (I know) have. Android is the default choice if you don’t want an iPhone. It’s the default and generic smartphone. All people who have Android phones I know don’t care about the OS at all. They may like the phone (Look at my nice new Samsung smartphone! Isn’t t…

"All people who have Android phones I know..."

Selection bias alert. I have an android phone that's nearly two years old, and I bought it specifically for the OS.

Re: 700,000 Android devices activated each day

#65

Post by ugh »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #64
ugh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that Android would be the easiest to switch away from. Not so much for any technical reasons, rather because of the mindset most Android buyers (I know) have. Android is the default choice if you don’t want an iPhone. It’s the default and generic smartphone. All people who have Android phones I know don’t care about the OS at all. They may like the phone (Look at my nice new Samsung smartphone! Isn’t t…

"All people who have Android phones I know..." Selection bias alert. I have an android phone that's nearly two years old, and I bought it specifically for the OS.

Yeah, selection bias alright. I just think I have the more plausible selection bias. That's all :-)

If you are selling nearly a million phones per day it's not the geeks who are buying (don't get me wrong, geeks are buying tons of Android phones – but they are a minority), it's normal people. And normal people don't buy for the OS (at least if it's not the iPhone).

It is my very clear impression that Android phones have become the default generic smartphone. People who want a smartphone (and in all likelihood also people who don’t even know they want a smartphone) but don’t know anything more specific than that will (with high probability) walk out of the store with an Android phone.

The carriers’ marketing speaks to that and also how they place those phones in their stores. Sure, the iPhone gets its stand and Nokia gets its stand but the big table in the middle is full of Android phones at all price points. (And, by the way, no big Android logo anywhere. If there are logos at all it’s the logos of the manufacturers.)

Re: 700,000 Android devices activated each day

#66

Post by bane »

pbreit wrote: post #39

I'm sure the number is accurate and kudos to Google but, wow, who the heck is activating all these devices? From the people I run into I would estimate the iOS:Android ratio at 10 or 20 to 1 (San Francisco).

My day job we have 2 holdouts still using iOS, the rest went BB->iOS->Android. 2 of us went BB->Android direct and based on our experiences we eventually converted the rest.

At a contract site I work at, out of 15 people on the team, only 1 has an iOS, the rest have some kind of Android variant (with 1 having a BB) two have switched from iOS to Android in the last 12 months. I wouldn't say there's significant peer pressure to switch, they just go to the store and end up with an Android device, so I expect carrier pressure is the source.

An inspection of the rest of the organization (about 500 people), shows it to be about 70/20/10 Android/BB/iOS.

At my startup we're 100% Android, but considering getting a couple iOS devices for development, but not day-to-day usage.

I have 3 friends who are Apple diehards, you'll get their iDevices out of their cold dead hands. But the rest are currently Android users, with one switching up phones every so often just to see what the other side has.

Coffee shops and trains around here (D.C.) show mostly Android phones and iPads. Very rare to see an Android tablet in the wild. iPhones are not too uncommon, but seem to belong to the younger, hipper crowd.

Re: 700,000 Android devices activated each day

#68

Post by sebbi »

X-Istence wrote: post #20

And these numbers are the reason why Android development is going to be a royal pain in the butt for a long time to come. There is just no incentive for Google to change the developer tools to be more developer friendly, to be more powerful when developers are forced to release an Android application simply because it is the platform with the most users on it. Despite the fact that from a development standpoint it is…

You don't have to have 30+ devices. The emulator is perfect for testing different form factors and if you want speed, just install (or use the live cd option) Androidx86 in VirtualBox and test there ...

As for bugs because of timing differences: if you have these kind of problems, that's not the fault of the plattform.

As for quality of applications, I have to agree. Some ports are just lazy and don't even begin to use all the possibilities of Android. And yes, I am looking at you Facebook & Twitter!

Re: 700,000 Android devices activated each day

#69

Post by babebridou »

X-Istence wrote: post #27
psychotik wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. I wish they also included how many different variants of Android were actually being shipped, and what version each one was. _Those_ numbers would make us developers tremble. With iOS, it's simple -- if a million iOS devices were activated today, I'd know they all ran the exact same version of iOS 5.x, and none were customized or bastardized by OEMs. At least on that front, I'm thankful to Apple (I can write a…

I recently read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3362072 a post by user "calloc" which I find quite interesting. I personally work for Absio Corp ( http://absio.com/ ) and we do Android development for the DoD and we too have found many of the issues that I've mentioned above and that calloc has found as well. At the moment we are testing on the Evo 4G, Photon 4G, Samsung Galaxy S II, and the Droid X, with a…

The current strategy for android is to keep pushing the device level up through app developers rather than through carriers. I'm now at a point where I do all my devs targetting Ice Cream Sandwich and including the compatibility packages for older versions. This does not fix all of the fragmentation you're referring to yet, but it's a very definitive step forward. Of course, this essentially means that potentially all my apps are carrying the same patch of the OS with them...

Anyway about 80% of my previous fragmentation issues were solved with ICS. The remaining 20% though, are the truly hard ones!

Re: 700,000 Android devices activated each day

#70

Post by byoung2 »

vosper wrote: post #50
untog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you go Android, you tend to stay there. I think that's conventional wisdom- and I think it's wrong. I went from Android to WP7, because I am a weird UI obsessive. But my girlfriend has an Android and is due an upgrade- and she's sick of it. She's likely going to get an iPhone.

Being "a weird UI obsessive" is a very small subset of users, given that if you asked a typical smartphone user what "UI" means a majority of them probably couldn't tell you.

I'd agree with that, but now that you mention it, I can say that I like HTC Sense UI better than stock Android or Samsung/Motorola UIs
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