[Tipadoo]

MrMojo1, on 11 April 2012 - 06:44 AM, said:

What I find about the article is that the author condescending in his tones against the Android OS.

"Why the vast majority of Android customers don’t seem willing to spend money on apps is anyone’s guess"

Has anyone noticed that there's only so much "apps" a person would want to buy or use? Does everyone really have the money or free time to "play" with apps?
I sure as heck don't!

"If you like Android, you buy an Android device. You either don’t buy many apps, or at best you buy the apps you can, and recognize that the majority of the world’s most exciting mobile development is happening across the aisle. That’s your right."

Yes, not everyone buys many apps because... there's really NO NEED to.
Many of the apps that people use are game-centric. Many of us DON'T NEED to play games on our devices. How many apps on "food" or "lifestyle" does a person need? Do you REALLY have NO life or have lots of money or both?

Android OS is a relatively new OS and is still developing and a work in progress just like how all OS systems started, just... like... the ... Mac OS... in the beginning!

This is MacWorld so obviously there's a bias Towards Apple products.

Do the readers a favor, Mr. Friedman, and keep your articles more neutral instead of baiting readers to respond! Just because we read articles on Macs does NOT mean everyone loves Apple products, but use them.

The age difference between these os's is small. Although I understand your irritation, you shouldn't mention the age difference as being significant when it is not. On top of that, specify the actual age difference like a previous poster did, specific and factual. Personally, I don't buy the spreading trend of thinking Android is for tinkerers/geeks while IOS is for straight up consumers with money to blow. Just ANOTHER line in the argument sand IMO.
As far as Macworld showing an inclination towards Apple products, are you surprised at this?
You're not a newbie in these forums so my guess would be no.
Opinion pieces like this are going to have a little bias in them, I mean, head on over to publications that are biased towards Android. To me, they're worse. All you have to do is read the Macalope articles, he/she points out tons of bias every week. The little bit of bias from Macworld writers is negligible in my opinion. Bias from posters will vary.

[bastion]

MrMojo1, on 11 April 2012 - 06:44 AM, said:

Android OS is a relatively new OS and is still developing and a work in progress just like how all OS systems started, just... like... the ... Mac OS... in the beginning!

Android is barely 4 months newer than iOS. In terms of accessibility to 3rd-party developers, Android has a 4-month edge. Both Android and iOS are derivatives of products that have been around for more than 20 years. Android's blessed development language and framework is Java, while for iOS it's Objective-C and a substantially overhauled rendition of Cocoa. Java definitely gets the win on familiarity among the programming community at large. To suggest that Android has "newness" as a mitigating factor is either ignorant or disingenuous.

Further the situation of Android (or iOS) today is absolutely nothing like the situation faced by the Mac in the mid-1980s. Developers coming to Mac OS before 1990 weren't just learning a new library. They were learning a whole new model of both program construction and user interaction, and using much more primitive tools to implement them. No comparison at all.

[JeffreyLayne]

I don't think OP realizes that optimizing the apps for the phone plays a major role. He talks about Android users do not buy their apps, this isn't true. You have plenty of Android users like myself who do buy the apps, so money isn't the problem here. It's optimizing, Mr. Lex Friedman from Macworld.com. I would expect such a smug article from an Apple supporter.

You have to optimize an app for the devise so it can run correctly on it, the ratio between the two brands have a massive difference. There are thousands of android devices while, count them: 11 iOS devices. You're talking about all of the iphone models, the ipads and itouches. VS. the various Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Sanyo, ZTE, Huwei and many other devices (Lets not forget that each brand has various models that use the Android OS)

So the problem here, Mr. Lex Friedman from Macworld.com. Is not the customers themselves, but the many devices that app dev's need to optimize their products for. And that is why it takes longer for an app to get on the Play Store.

[bastion]

JeffreyLayne, on 12 July 2012 - 01:45 AM, said:

I don't think OP realizes that optimizing the apps for the phone plays a major role. He talks about Android users do not buy their apps, this isn't true. You have plenty of Android users like myself who do buy the apps, so money isn't the problem here. It's optimizing, Mr. Lex Friedman from Macworld.com. I would expect such a smug article from an Apple supporter.

You have to optimize an app for the devise so it can run correctly on it, the ratio between the two brands have a massive difference. There are thousands of android devices while, count them: 11 iOS devices. You're talking about all of the iphone models, the ipads and itouches. VS. the various Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Sanyo, ZTE, Huwei and many other devices (Lets not forget that each brand has various models that use the Android OS)

So the problem here, Mr. Lex Friedman from Macworld.com. Is not the customers themselves, but the many devices that app dev's need to optimize their products for. And that is why it takes longer for an app to get on the Play Store.

"Thousands" of Android devices is apparently a secret code that means "about 200." And there have been more than 11 iOS devices. Since you didn't get those trivially verifiable facts correct, I can't be surprised that you've also made subtler errors in your post. It's not merely about "optimization" in the sense that developers would normally use that word. It's about such a significant amount of fragmentation - that nasty thing that Android advocates continually claim isn't a real thing - in both hardware and deployed OS versions that applications have to be coded differently for different categories of device. The smugness you see in the article simply isn't there. It's actually quite a good article with little in the way of editorializing. Rather, it's citing a great deal of independent, disinterested research and the experiences and attitudes of working application developers.

[GabrielaOrtiz]

This not mention that android free software can do more that 90% of users want. So future have more android than ios devices.

[HistorianInMe]

I am getting an Android soon, and I can vouch for the whole not buying apps. I own an iPod Touch and also plan to buy an iPad soon. When it comes to apps, the only apps I'd consider on the Android will be free. This is partly because I don't want to buy apps that I will lose if for some reason I cannot afford phone service anymore. With my iPod and iPad that wouldn't be a problem.

Besides, Android doesn't have my fave apps such as F Sim Space Shuttle or Infinite Flight. The one app they do have, X Plane, costs $65 total when you include all the routes and planes as in app purchases whereas on the iPod Touch and iPad the whole game costs $10.

Now that I think about it, that is probably why X Plane sells the planes and routes separately on the Android because they weren't making much money from the game itself unlike on the iOS system.

[TertlTank]

It's been a while since this article was posted, but I have to chime in for two reasons.

1) the Galaxy S3 and Note 2 with a mostly Google ecosystem are giving Apple a run for the money for some users. Fragmentation be damned; like most users of the iPhone who buy the latest and greatest, most Android aficionados will buy the latest and greatest (e.g. the Galaxy phones) Fragmentation is MOOT because once you look at the top 6 handsets from the the top 3 manufacturers you're good to go. Those are the devices, not the BOGO free models that devs should be coding for.

2) Google's ecosystem, which was pathetic compared to Apple's, has caught up and is giving cloud computing adopters a real option for putting down the laptop and picking up any tablet iOS or Android and getting access to all of their apps and files. Take that, and the fact that Play will now TELL YOU if your device is compatible or not, and you have no reason to whine about wanting to code for 200 devices or just 6 which is usually 1 or 2 more than the typical Apple four.

If the article stopped at money, I would have agreed. But it had to go into the whiny developer spin. It's my job to research and deploy tech, and frankly, iOS needs the dev support. The phone doesn't come with anything really useful, unlike much of the Android headsets (e.g. how long did iOS users have to wait/how much did they have to spend to get turn-by-turn?)