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Why Android Is the New Windows
An anonymous reader writes "Windows' dominance of the PC market has been good in many ways: reduced hardware costs, increased IT literacy and a standard development platform to name a few. Perhaps Android will bring similar benefits. But unless Google are very careful, it is likely to bring some of the same problems, too."
The biggest problem with Android is that from a developers point of view, it's a horrible platform. It's not just Android - this goes way back to early Symbian versions, Windows Mobile and other early mobile OS versions.
Basically, you have tons of different devices you need to support, all with different hardware, resolution and features. They might or might not have changes made by the phone manufacturer and/or telcos. They might have physical keyboards or only touchscreen. Maybe multitouch on some. Camera on the back, maybe front too, or not at all? Different API's supported by different versions of Android.. It's a nightmare.
This may now a days work okay for computers because they have a lot more power and space and you don't need to worry about batteries so much. But as for mobile developers, that's not true yet and it means you have to create and test your applications and games for every device and most likely make some changes and bugfixes to some of them. Take for example the popular Angry Birds game - the developers have outright said they just cannot support all the different Android devices.
As much as I dislike Apple, iPhones are a solid platform. They have a few different versions of the OS (there needs to be progress, right?), but that's it. Much better for developers and for users. While Windows Phone 7 has definitely taken a better approach than before, they also haven't considered this issue.
Window's dominance of the PC market has been good in many ways ... increased IT literacy
What?! That's like saying McDonald's did anything for fine cuisine. Gimme a break!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Looks like I'm sticking with the iPhone for a while then. I've gotten to the point where I'll happily sacrifice a small amount of money and a little flexibility in exchange for a well-vetted, vertically integrated solution rather than an assembly kit that I can use - if I wish - to build something great. With the increased power to do your own thing all to frequently comes the need to do your own thing, with your own time and your own money. Not on my phone, thanks - I'll leave tinkering to the hobbies I choose rather than a useful accessory for my life. And yes, I'm a developer.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
"The entire phenomenon of viruses and malware is a result of the proliferation of Windows, the people behind malware take advantage of that same standard development platform."
This sentence is so stupid that it invalidates the arguments contained within the entire article. Who thinks that if Apple and their marriage of hardware and software were to have only existed in some anti-Capra Steve Jobs as Mister Potter world of computing, that viruses and malware would have not existed? Because there are no viruses for MAC OS? By that logic, wouldn't NeXT Step have been the most secure UNIX ever? To lay the existence of malware at Redmond's feet is to be so ignorant of computing and O/S design as to make anything said about Android totally and completely moot.
This would have happened for ANY OS that wasn't tied to a big-iron vendor. As I recall, this was (and continues to be) true for Macs as well.
No. Unless you jailbreak, the software you run on it has to pass a vetting by them. If they pull it later, you'd better hope you don't lose the copy on your PC/Mac.
Are you sure you haven't mixed up Apple and Google? Last I checked, you weren't forced to go to the Marketplace to install software except on a few obscenely locked down devices from AT&T.
where do you come up with this shit? on android you have an .apk that can run whether or not google removes it from the app store or entirely for that matter.
Not only that, but these .apk's aren't hidden, they're on your phone, and even without root access you can back them up easily with plenty of solutions. Plenty of people install android apps without ever hitting the android market or ever having a wifi connection. in fact, there's an entire forum dedicated to it, essentially . Did I mention that things are fairly well documented?
on iphone you can have it forcefully removed remotely, even by using the old version.
So if Android is Windows, iOS is MacOS, does that make Maemo/Meego the Linux of the mobile world?
"My N900 runs Linux."
"So does my Android phone."
"But the N900 runs GNU/Linux!"
I still get to feel superior.
DOS/Windows gave people more control over their computers. people had the software locally and could install anything they wanted. anytime.
same with my iphone. i have all the files local on my laptop. if apple pulls an app then i can still use it. all i do is add the .app file in itunes and it will still sync. if someone breaks an app with an update i can still use the old version if i keep all the files.
with android the app install process is in the cloud and controlled by google
Nonsense. Unlike the iPhone, Android has always allowed installation of apps without going through the store. You can download them through the web browser, install them from the SD card, and there are 3rd party market apps that compete with the Google market.
On Android, without rooting it or installing iTunes you can backup and install .apk files using a file explorer. The only "in the cloud" part is if the developer uses Google's version of DRM via the Market app. As long as you paid for the app, it doesn't care what version it is, so this too is no problem. So without being anchored to the iTunes monolith you can do this version management on the phone in the middle of nowhere.
I don't find the android platform any harder to code for than anything else; younger programmers do not want to learn Java and that is creating far more problems for the platform than malware.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Multitouch doesn't work right. Even single touch is fidgety and glitchy. Interactivity is rough... lots of hitches in animations, complete multi-second freezes for no apparent reason, allowing of apps to take over and drag everything down. I have a few different Android devices, and on every one of them I have to yank the battery every couple of weeks to get them un-stuck.
It's nowhere close to as polished as iOS. For a techy user that knows how to deal with these issues and enjoys the openness, it's fine. For Joe Anyuser, it's a pale imitation of iOS.
Some of you should check the statistics on global smart phone dominance.
Do you mean the stats that show Nokia's profitability collapsing, and coming in below analysts' estimates? The stats that show their sales are flat, despite a drop in prices? The stats that show Apple, RIM, and Android phones eating their lunch? The statements from their executives that their profitability problems are due to their inability to deliver a smartphone that could take on the iPhone?
You're right, I can complain about the $99/yr cost. There is absolutely no reason why I should have to pay an additional $99/year just to install what i want on a device I own.
Nokia's dominance is misinterpreted. Yes, they sell a lot of phones, but at thin margins and on a platform that doesn't seem much development, nor to people likely to run or buy anything for their phone anyway.
I have an E72 and like it (and an E71 before that, and an N80 before that_, but the apps are piss-poor in functionality next to Android or iOS, the interface clunky, the development environment troubling and the phones themselves very, very low spec. As far as "where the money is" they're well back of RIM and Microsoft and show no intention of addressing the serious strategic problems that have kept them that way.
--srj/mmv
Nokia has no problem with competing with other phone manufacturers using the same OS. That's what Symbian was all about. Both HTC and Samsung and many others were licensees of Symbian alongside Nokia. And in fact the Series 60 UI layered on top of Symbian OS was the property of Nokia, and they would and did license it to any other manufacturer that wanted it.
Likewise, Nokia open sourced the MeeGo mobile phone OS they created so that other manufacturers could release phones using the same OS.
As regards Windows Mobile 7, Nokia have never, and will never use a Microsoft operating system. They don't want to allow Microsoft to dominate the mobile phone market place in the way they dominated the PC market place. And they want to be fully in control of their own user experience, which Microsoft has never allowed.
Nokia is all for standards in the market, including shared OSs. They just don't want Microsoft or Google or any other single company to be in control. Likewise if Apple were to license iOS, Nokia wouldn't use it either, for the same reasons.
I'm also an Android developer and I don't share those concerns. There have been some frustrations, yes, but there are usually decent workarounds for a lot of things. As an example: Bluetooth support wasn't really solid until 2.0, yet there are excellent backport open-source libraries that make it easy to provide that support to 1.5 and 1.6 devices.
I completely disagree about reflection as well. Using reflection you can degrade gracefully for platforms that dont support what you're doing. Reflection is not ugly at all, it actually quite an elegant deign pattern imho.
If you're ending up with 6 layouts for each screen you're doing something wrong and perhaps overreaching in your support for older devices or your layout is overly complicated. It's unreasonable to think the latest Mass Effect game would run on a tiny 320x240 screen. And while that's hyperbole, yes, the point is made.
Just to be clear though, I don't find you concerns invalid, However I don't think this is unique to Android.
Granted there is still much work Google and the manufacturers could do to streamline all of this. But any software development platform, any OS, has some level of variation for what is supported. OSX, Linux, iOS, WebOS, Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, Symbian, HTML5/JS/CSS, Blackberry OS. Really the only platforms that don't, are the video game consoles. But now even that's starting to happen there too with external storage and peripherals.
meep
at least in australia, nokia is still doing ok. Apple dominates the smartphone sector here, with Symbian 'feature phones' keeping pace with Android devices. Though the pre-Christmas advertising blitz on Nokia handsets may well be Symbian's last throw of the dice.
Nokia's strategy is passable, only a couple of years late. Base everything on Qt and attract Linux hackers turned off by obj-c/dalvik and app-stores. Use the same technology as mainstream linux (wayland, as embraced by Ubuntu). Since Qt is cross platform they can offer a seamless UI common to the phone and Windows/Linux/OS X. Which means the end of that clunky PC Suite!
Fanboys are hilarious aren't they.
"Well well you can always invalidate the warranty."
"But I don't want to invalidate the warranty on something that costs hundreds of pounds."
"Well, well you can pay $99 per year on top of the £40 a month to your cellphone company to do what you want with it."
Incidentally can you install what you like using Windows or do you need to fork out for the Mac as well? If you need to buy a Mac as well then that makes it even more hilarious.
If you are creating an operating system that can be extended to support new devices with different hardware, it is a given that fragmentation will occur. In the end, fragmentation abates as hardware manufacturers start seeing software publishers ignore devices because of compatibility. This process is not working well with cell phones because of the 1 and 2 year contract models the carriers use to sell phones. People often don't know the device they are buying has issues or isn't going to get any software maintenance or upgrades until after the return period expires on their smartphone purchase, so they have to wait until the contract is up.
-- $G
Bad analogy. You are not seeing a replay of Wintel vs. Unix. That was never, ever a real competition and was over before it started because AT&T wanted too much in royalties for Unix to compete with lower cost operating systems. The window for Unix closed when the 386 processorr, Windows NT and the client-server model enabled developers to do similar things with a PC that could only be done with a minicomputer or Unix box before.
Microsoft's genius with Windows was to marshal hardware manufacturing capacity and force price competition to lower the cost of hardware. Companies like Chips & Technologies, Intel, AMD and others provided reference designs to lower R&D costs and sell their chipsets and microprocessors. MS provided the operating system that made everything work. The chip makers got orders, and MS got installs. The result was that competing manufacturers who were not using Windows + Intel had much higher R&D costs and could not compete on price, or availability. Those competitors ranged from Apple, Silicon Graphics, NeXT, Commodore, Apollo (who became HP's Unix division), to Sun. Anyone who didn't have a Wintel box had to build or license their own OS, and would have to compete with a slightly inferior competitor (well, in some cases, very inferior) that generally delivered a better price:performance ratio. Who needs a Silicon Graphics workstation when a PC with a Targa card could (almost, kinda) do the same thing for 1/2 the price? Why buy a $4,500 Mac II when a $2,000 PC can run PageMaker?
Google and chip suppliers are executing the exact same strategy against Apple - chip manufacturers provide reference designs to phone manufacturers who extend reference designs to better compete. Android makes it all work. The Wintel / Qualdroid (Qualcomm/Android) strategy is a very effective way to rapidly increase market share and scale a market at the same time. It also guarantees all the other players niche status when all the shouting is over. As soon a cell carriers figure out that they are locking themselves out of revenue by not letting users have more control of their phones, the fragmentation problem will go away as users remove the crappy stuff they don't want, and install the stuff they do... just like they do when they take a freemium infested PC home from Best Buy.
-- $G
Symbian on Nokia is goddamn awful; as the owner of an E72, I know.
Illogical and bizarre menu layout and options, features not working out of the box (SIP support, anyone? good luck with that), neutered hardware (128MB of RAM, same as its predecessor from two years prior), miserably broken connection management (use wifi when available, cellular when not... that should NOT be hard, nor should it be something I have to configure on a per-application basis), an inbox/outbox/sent/drafts folder system for SMS messages (like phones had ten years ago), no meaningful app development from anyone but nokia themselves... I could go on.
Suffice it to say that Symbian is a handset OS dating back to monochrome displays and the original GSM spec, hacked and hacked to look, superficially, like something modern.
The only positive thing I can say about my phone is that it's a bluetooth cellular modem right out of the box.
It doesn't even do properly the things it was advertised as doing, to say nothing of the impressive things that third party software lets android or even apple phones do.
Nokia got it's last dollar out of me with the E72; I don't care what they make after this, pure spite will keep me from ever buying it.