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Woz Misquoted About Android Dominating iOS
bonch writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's quote that Android would dominate over iOS was widely covered by the tech press, but after seeking clarification, Engadget reports that Wozniak was misquoted by Dutch paper De Telegraaf. 'Almost every app that I have is better on the iPhone,' says Woz, claiming that he would never say that Android was better than iOS. 'I'm not trying to put Android down, but I'm not suggesting it's better than iOS by any stretch of the imagination. But it can get greater marketshare and still be crappy.' Woz has an Engadget account and has posted further comments to the linked article."
Steve Wozniak may or may not have been saying Android or any other os would or would not dominate IOS or other OSES in any potential platform that has been and will be invented in future. This may, or may not be a news broadcast.
Read radical news here
This is proven daily by Microsoft.
In fact, I suspect that could be applied to an incredible number of consumer products and politicians.
and like most royalty, it's ugly, inbred, useless and long past it's time.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
AAPL was up about $8 this morning before Engadget posted the correction. Dutch commenters on Engadget have equated the Dutch paper doing the quoting with the UK's The Sun or The National Enquirer in the US.
Me, I just remember the numerous times I've been interviewed or quoted by publications, or read a report about something that I witnessed. Almost without fail I'll be misquoted at some point (usually not horribly, but it's certainly not exactly what I said), and the report of what I witnessed gets something wrong. So I'm more willing to believe that a paper with a less-than-stellar reputation got it wrong rather than spin off into some conspiracy theory.
That was supposed to be a joke, I highly doubt anyone who trades stocks even notices what The Woz says.
AAPL's current price is yet another sign the stock market makes no damn sense.
Who actually reads Slashdot for the articles?
"instead of linking us to the information directly, we get a link to a poor writeup on a third-rate PR web site, possibly without an actual link to anything more relevant?"
So Engadget is the third-rate PR web site in this case? I hate to burst your bubble, but Engadget gets 4x the visitors that slashdot does, 2 million vs 500k, so really we're the third-rate website
Also slashdot stories are user submitted, so it only makes sense that their would be links to stories written by writers that (hopefully) do research.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
You know a lot of people have turned the price of a Mac and their $99 Developer Program expenses into a shit ton of cash.
Sure, you could try the same trick on Android, but even though there are more Android phones sold now, Apple's App Store accounts for 92% of the cell phone application store bucks spent. App Store coders like me certainly won't miss the competition, anyway, so yeah, stick to your plan of not developing for the iOS. That's the best advice I can give you.
And a lot of people have turned $1 into millions of dollars with a lottery ticket, but that doesn't mean people who buy lottery tickets aren't morons.. While there are success stories, the economics for the average developer may not be quite so bright, as this article suggests. It may not be dead on and things have probably changed somewhat with iAds, but it probably isn't a good choice by itself.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
You know a lot of people have turned the price of a Mac and their $99 Developer Program expenses into a shit ton of cash.
Sure, you could try the same trick on Android, but even though there are more Android phones sold now, Apple's App Store accounts for 92% of the cell phone application store bucks spent. App Store coders like me certainly won't miss the competition, anyway, so yeah, stick to your plan of not developing for the iOS. That's the best advice I can give you.
Don't forget about the headaches that come with programming for the platform. Angry Birds developers also have come out to say, in many words and with a lot of cact, what a headache it is to develop for the fragmented hardware platform.
"I'm not trying to put Android down, but... it can get greater marketshare and still be crappy."
I'm Dutch and I concur. Comparing De Telegraaf to The Sun feels about right. I won't comment about this incident, but De Telegraaf is not known for being nonpartisan and rigorous, to put it nicely.
Apple trades at around 20 times its earnings, similar to Google and Oracle which are both market leaders as well. Nothing out of the ordinary here. What doesn't seem to make sense is why a company like Amazon trades at 60 times its earnings. Is its growth potential 3 times greater than Apple?
You know a lot of people have turned the price of a Mac and their $99 Developer Program expenses into a shit ton of cash.
Far less than the number of people who have turned the price of a Windows license and a MSDN subscription into a shit ton of cash, I assure you. After all, corporations pay a lot better than hipsters.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
from the comments, most engadget readers (and I'm one but I digress) are pro-sumers at best and often sound like high schoolers fighting over whose gadget is coolest. You don't seem to get any actual techs or engineers (at least those of us there are smart enough to keep our mouth shut since the SNR is so darned high) unlike here where you can (sometimes) get engaged in interesting discussions on the real technical specifics.
This is so true. A comment here has no credibility in and of itself but there WILL be serious physicists posting on a physics story here. The same with any other scientific, technical, or engineering article.
There is plenty of hyperbole posted. When I read a hyperbole headline a glance at the comments will usually reveal how and why the article/summary isn't what it seemed within 5-10 lines.
Amazon is still recouping it's costs. It's not as profitable as it can be. That said 60 times is still fairly speculative.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Is exactly the same battle as Apple vs. Microsoft a decade ago. And Apple will lose again for the same reasons: Inflated price, locked platform, and developer exclusion. Woz sees the obvious. Jobs apparently does not.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Dutch commenters on Engadget have equated the Dutch paper doing the quoting with the UK's The Sun or The National Enquirer in the US.
Then where are the titties???
It would be more accurate to compare the telegraaf to Fox News: one ultra conservative 800 lb gorilla in a jungle of moderate or liberal silk monkeys.
That article makes some good points (e.g., focus on the easy money first), but it's also pretty obviously twisting numbers to fit a pre-conceived notion. For instance, the author has no problem simply picking out numbers to claim that development costs for an iPhone app is over 11 times as expensive as an equivalent WAP or mobile web site. At very least, I'd want to ask a couple of people who'd done similar work because that's a pretty huge disparity.
I've yet to see anything even resembling a good analysis of app risk/reward. After not having good detailed numbers on the iPhone app market, another huge problem is that despite all the complaints, Apple lets in way too many worthless apps -- "me too" apps, especially, as well as apps that just don't do anything particularly useful. (I still see ads for jobs like "help us develop a crappy medical equipment ad as an iPhone app.") I don't care that some amateur developer spent too long figuring out how to make the fiftieth fart app and didn't make money off of it, and so far every story I've read about people not making much money has been along those lines. I am very curious about developers who make solid apps that have some sort of noticeable, worthwhile and unique quality to them, and how they end up doing.
You're from US?
Welcome to the free world - over here (Hong Kong) we have plans, usually no contracts. Discounts on phones (for those who opt for it) are given in the form of pre-payment and discount later on your monthly bills.
Phones and plans are not much related. Sim cards are freely exchangeable, and you can switch easily between carriers (it takes only a few days to port over your number).
And yes Hong Kong people are known to buy, on average, a new phone every six months. Crazy I agree, but that's the reality. After all, you don't want to be seen with the previous generation iPhone, do you?
I believe the apps you have may be better than their Android counterparts. But it's all about apps you don't have.
I'm typing this on a tram from a netbook tethered to my Android phone. How good is your tethering app?
When I browse from the phone, I see clean web due to adblock. How good is your adblock?
If I want my phone to last over a week, I downclock the CPU to 1/4 the original speed and disable all peripherials except GSM radio. It's still usable as a phone. How good is your overclocking/downclocking app?
Oh, and I have some shell scripts to do some work-related calculations. Good luck with your programming languages on your phone.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Very much, it's the free world. Not sure whether you're trolling or not but some explanation appears to be in place.
If you think it is the same as China, think again. It belongs politically to China but for the rest in practice it's more like an independent country.
Hong Kong is one of the free-est countries in the world, ranking nr. 1 in the Heritage Foundation list for economic freedom (this compared to the US which comes in at nr 8).
It's a free port, little restrictions to capital flow with a freely convertible currency, open immigration policy, with a government that is maybe even more pro-business than the US is (and yes that government is a major problem but luckily it stays mostly out of the way). Hong Kong also has press freedom (a decent nr. 34 on the Reporters without Borders 2010 list - China is near the bottom on nr 171).
It's also a place with a strong rule of law and a fair, highly respected justice system and police, and one of the lowest corruption rates in the world, ranking 15th on the "corruption perception index 2010", two places higher than the US.
Furthermore Hong Kong is slowly but surely moving towards full democracy, so that government thingy will be solved too. Freedom of press is also being protected furiously - remember 2003 when about half a million people (or a full 7% of the total population!) went to the streets to protect those freedoms.
"De Telegraaf" interviewed him? No wonder.. they are not thrustworthy in my oppinion.
De Telegraaf is a glossy magazine in newspaper format. Its mostly about what A said about B, what B thinks about this, and what the newspaper speculates C has to do with it.
It also recently bought Hyves.nl, the dutch Facebook.com. Not sure why.
It has the worst page layout i've ever seen in a newspaper. I recon each issue contains every font known to man, in all font sizes upto 3cm, and tries to apply every font style and linespacing imaginable.
It often posts bullshit stories only to rectify them the day after -with another huge headline- as if its the news itself. Just like American newschannels do.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
In all fairness, I don't think anyone doubt that Android will outpace the iPhone. I mean, 5 major phone manufacturers all produces Android smartphones at a pace of 5/year each and with one thing in mind: bring the iPhone down. Of course, 50 handets to 1, they will collectively win.
That said, I don't foresee very clearly the time when the iPhone will be outsold by ONE handset.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
"De Telegraaf" is not that right-wing. THAT would be a political view. Its view of the world is more "against". Not against left or right, just against. Immigrants? Against. Deporting immigrants? Against. Restrictions on immigrants? Against.
It will one day warn of the risks of 2nd hand smoke, then next day run an article that bans on smoking are bad. If anything the Telegraaf is the Teaparty. They don't have any ideas, they just know everyone elses ideas suck.
The Sun and Fox News have very clear political agenda's. When The Sun backed Labour this was clear throughout its pages. De Telegraaf isn't clear on a single page. That makes it far harder to deal with. How do you deal with a newspaper and its audience that in one paper can argue against a powerplant being build in an area AND argue that we got to cut through this red tape and get powerplants build? Impossible. It is the ultimate NIMBY newspaper.
All the other newspapers in Holland however are just as unclear. For instance shouldn't the Volkskrant (left) be more worried about the effects of immigrants on wages? Shouldn't Elsevier (right) be more honest about business demand for cheap immigrant labour?
That is the real reason The Telegraaf is so hated (and the most read), it is sure to upset everyone, except its readers.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yet, that's a Rovio specific problem, because other games which are far more resource intensive are developed for Android just fine without facing such issues.
The problem is almost certainly that Rovio tried to pull of a lazy port, and rather than rewrite specifically for Android, likely pulled across a bunch of C code from the other platforms they initially wrote for and interfaced using the NDK. This means you need a higher spec on average than on the original platform to achieve the same performance results, and that if you haven't taken advantage of the available abstraction layers, then you're bound to face unpredictable results. This is how things like SCUMM were ported across- sure it was done quickly, but the end result isn't very good.
This is similar to the problems that even single hardware platform devices have faced with ports in the past such as the PS3- on release many PS3 games were poor ports of the XBox 360 version, and it wasn't because the PS3 couldn't cope, it was merely because they'd been ported over in the fastest, cheapest way possible, without care for the fact that'll make it a second rate product on that platform.
So effectively you're conflating the issue of Android development with the problems caused by a poor porting process by using Angry Birds as your example. These are two different issues, and in mixing them up as you have, you've made out the issue of fragmentation to be more of a problem than it really is. There's really no reason developing for Android has to be any more problematic than dealing with the fragmentation with Apple's platforms- screen resolution differences between the iPhone 4, iPad and other devices, OS differences between the iPhone, iPad, and iPhone 3G/3Gs/4, differences in processing power across devices, and differences in available hardware between devices.
If you think programming for Android and dealing with fragmentation causes headaches, you've clearly never developed for any platform over any period of time. Fragmentation exists on every platform designed to last more than a generation be it Android, Windows, iOS. Exceptions would be things like the PS3 or Wii or XBox 360 where they are only designed to last a generation but even here if you develop a game designed to be released on more than one of these systems you face the fragmentation problem.
Fragmentation is something for non-programmers, inexperienced programmers and trolls to whinge about. For skilled, professional developers, it's a fact of life you've long learnt to deal with because it's merely the price of progress, the only alternative is to simply use a platform that never progresses and rapidly becomes outdated, something which Apple, despite holding out on what quickly became an abysmally low screen resolution of the iPhone compared to the industry standard all the way up until the 3GS finally accepted is a bad idea unless you want to be seen to have a product that sucks.
It's a shame people like you who are clearly inexperienced at software development keep parroting this myth, because it sounds so dumb to those of us who do know the topic, and do know what we're on about. It's also why it's not scared people off Android and why Android is powering ahead in terms of developer numbers and handset sales, because people who do know what they're on about know that the fragmentation argument is little more than a troll made by people who simply don't know what they are talking about.
I replied, so that perhaps your eyes (and your fellow country men & women) are opened, and you don't believe the propaganda,
I live in the place; am not a native; and am like many around me highly critical of both the Hong Kong and central government.
corruption *perception* not sure how it's measured, but I presume it's not the same as actual corruption rates,
Agreed. However Hong Kong is worldwide considered as a really clean city when it comes to corruption; largely thanks to the great work done by the ICAC.
How does Hong Kong rank for democratically elected government, how does it rank in freedom of speech, freedom of press?, civil liberty?
Press freedom, as I wrote already, is nr 34 in the world. Not great, but not bad at all too. And it's defended vigorously. I have yet to hear about someone put behind bars for saying something the government doesn't like. And I hear so often the government complaining about criticism by the press - not that they dare to do anything about it, it does indicate the press is doing their job.
And for democracy: half of legco is now democratically elected, that must improve. But with the freedom of protest people power works: serious discontent and the 2003 pro-democracy march is what toppled the then-CE Tung Che-Hwa. That was a major embarrassment for the central government but they had no choice. So maybe not direct elections, the people have a voice and it's listened to. Soap-box democracy you could call it.
Actually I would bet good money that most people who buy a MSDN license never renew it after their first year, and that most people coding for Windows never make a damn dime on their own time.
Sure they are getting paid "going rate" for a .NET coder, which these days is about $15 / hour, but there isn't even the slightest chance they will hit paydirt. Even if they have a great idea for a new program, and do all the work themselves, the guys on the corporate board will take home most of that cash.
So, in the final analysis, hipsters pay MUCH MUCH better than corporations, as long as you aren't mediocre.
Read your linked article again. It's ridiculous.
The development cost for most iPhone developers is $99. They aren't quitting their day jobs in order to slave over XCode all day - they are banging these apps out in their spare time.
As the AC said, the author of the linked article has an obvious agenda - to steer people away from iPhone app development, and then he proceeds to put together a bunch of tangled assertions which supposedly support his agenda.
Unfortunately it still doesn't seem to work. I've seen plenty of articles where I am reasonably knowledgeable about the subject (either having worked in that area or because it is my product!) and yet there are plenty of uninformed comments which are then voted up by uninformed moderators.
I've tried posting but often my comments never get voted up because they go against what the current +5 opinion is. After a while I just don't bother any more.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Fragmentation is something that can be handled with proper spec'ing and testing, but equating the fragmentation between exactly 9 different iOS devices (well, 11, if you split the 3G/no 3G ipad, and count the Apple TV), and the veritable cornucopia of hardware that runs Android seems a bit cavalier. The strategies for managing those two markets (and the volumes of capital required for proper testing) are quite distinct, in my opinion.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
There are not very many words there (not much of a reader, are you?) and they do not say anything about a headache.
The article has 430 words, and it can be summarized in "we can't support all Android units.
Also, from the link:
With our latest update, we worked hard to bring Angry Birds to even more Android devices. Despite our efforts, we were unsuccessful in delivering optimal performance.
I don't know you, but with my basic knowledge of slang, I'd call a headache anything I worked hard to do and despite all my efforts I found myself unsuccessful at doing it.
They do whine about their game not running on older, slower devices. Guess what? You have precisely the same problem on iOS devices, where your app will behave differently on iPhone, iPhone 3GS, older iPod touch, newer iPod touch, and iPad.
You do realize that they list newer hardware in the article (like the TMobile G2) and that Angry Birds runs flawlessly smooth in first generation iPhones despite those units only having 412mhz chips? Same game. Slower hardware. Running smoother.
That is what comes with hardware fragmentation. Graphic chips, ram speed, all that changes on every unit, sometimes even units made by the same manufacturer. Chip changes specially are a huge deal, as not all handle OpenGl the same way, making it forceful to test your code on every single unit and somtimes optimize for each, regardless how new the hardware is. THAT is fragmentation, not in the OS but in the hardware.
Oh and yea, it happens in the PC world too. Big studios spend a lot of money in Q&A to test across many configurations and the most common variety off video cards. At the end of the day they tend to only support two of all the graphic chip brands out there, because it's just not viable to test for all. That seems to be the way of the Android, developers will have to test certain cellphones with certain chips and just tell their users they can only support those.
You are an Apple fanboy or shill. Go away.
You are an Android fanboy who cant read and accept the facts. I accept iPhones are closed and not everyone can develop completely freely for them, and the fact that they are locked up with the second worst carrier in the US. Why can't you accept Android's flaws too?
I do love my day job, why else would I do it?
I use a lot of FREE(libre) software both and home and at work I have no plans to write any software for a mobile platform that is not FREE.
There are basically only three platforms: old iPhone / iPod Touch, retina iPhone / iPod Touch, iPad.
The complaints about the RIAA et al, are because the figures are reversed - for every dollar spent, the lion's share goes to them for "promotion, distribution, A&R and recouping investment" while a tiny slice goes to the artist. Apple's cut is the small share, and covers hosting, distribution and a small fee. Apple aren't making hay on the app store in software sales - the cost covers the expenditure, with a little left over. The RIAA, on the other hand, takes the bulk and says "be happy for it".
Apple's profit on software sales from the app store (and similarly, profit on music/movie sales) is clearly stated in their financial statements, and you cannot lie on those (well, you can, but they're not Enron or WorldCon), so we can be reasonably sure they're not lying when they say "the 30% cut covers running the store" - the profit margin is pretty low. The real reason they do it is to drive sales of iPods and iPhones - which makes up an *enormous* amount of their overall profit (dwarfing even sales of laptops and desktops). The pittance from the app store software sales themselves are just a drop in the bucket.
Could they offer hosting and distribution for free? Sure, and it wouldn't hurt them in the grand scheme of things all that much, but it's still not a negligible figure - the store consumes a huge amount of bandwidth, and it's certainly not free to keep all those servers running all the time. I imagine they have weighed the cost of charging a nominal amount for taking the hassle out of distributing a developer's app (no server hassle, no hosting bills, no need for billing, no need for any of that - you just get a check in the mail, minus 30%) with offering the same deal for free and decided that enough people will see the 30% as reasonable.
I know which I would prefer (hosting and distributing my app myself, and keeping whatever profit was left after expenses, versus having apple do it and lose 30% of the total to them, but not have any of the expense or hassle of doing it in house), but then, convenience is high on my list of desires.
The only missing part is the ability to choose to do it all in house if you want, but given that the cut is not *too* severe, and that if you were going to do it yourself you would still have to pay for hosting, bandwidth, staff, billing expenses, server costs etc, I'm not sure too many people worry about it. Apple has economies of scale on its side to keep those costs low by averaging them out. I guess if you were big enough and had enough apps you could get your costs under 30c per dollar of revenue for all those things, but for indie developers who really just want to focus on writing apps, having that headache taken away from them is more than worth it.