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Why Are There So Few Honeycomb Apps?
Fudge Factor 3000 writes "PC World's Brent Rose investigates the reason behind the dearth of Honeycomb apps even though the OS was released in February with the release of the Xoom. One would have expected an explosion of Android tablet apps like that seen with the iPad but the Honeycomb-optimized apps remain in the low hundreds. The answer, it turns out, is not that simple. The main contributing factors appear to be the low demand for Honeycomb tablets and the difficulty in discovering Honeycomb-optimized apps in the Market. Hopefully, this will be rectified in the near future."
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He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
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He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
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He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing
...and platform fragmentation, perhaps?
How many are waiting until Google gets it act together with Honeycomb and comes out with Ice Cream Sandwich?
How many just don't have Honeycomb devices?
How many are protesting that there has been no Honeycomb source release by Google?
How many Honeycomb apps were expected?
Google does and can not force honeycomb actively onto the devices. Right now the majority of devices is not Honeycomb. So i would not program for Honeycomb. I am not even sure i would test on Honeycomb. The facilities which pre-Honeycomb Android offers are quite enough for nearly all application i can imagine.
And if we talk about "tablet-specific" well there are application which make use of the older tablets.
The main contributing factors appear to be the low demand for Honeycomb tablets and the difficulty in discovering Honeycomb-optimized apps in the Market. Hopefully, this will be rectified in the near future.
Seems simple to me. I went to Best Buy this weekend, and the number of competing, often incompatible tablets, is enough to drive someone to give up and just buy an iPad. Not only the Xoom and the Galaxy tab, but also HP's latest webOS tab, and Blackberry's Playbook, and a number of other random ones. It was hard to figure out (especially standing in the store) what the differences were. I can easily see why someone would go for the iPad after seeing all that, since it has some name recognition.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you look at past responses on Slashdot, many here seem fine with UI that is simply scaled up to whatever size screen is presented.
Apple made a case to developers that the UI should be re-thought for something the size of a tablet - a sentiment I agree with. The iPhone supports just as many auto-scaling abilities as does Android, but the simply truth is that something the size of an iPad cries out for a different UI layout, not just windows that grow larger. You hold a tablet differently than a phone for one thing, so control positions should be re-thought. Having a whole screen slide over ala a navigation controller on an iPhone makes no sense on something with a huge screen, or at least looks goofy.
So while I really think the number of Android tablet apps is underestimated because of the number of applications that properly support scaling, the average quality is quite low because of the lack of developers willing to totally re-think the UI for a tablet form factor.
I think the intermediate 7" tablets really muddy the water. If that's the only "tablet" you had simply having a UI autoscale would probably seem sufficient.
If HP can improve WebOS performance in time on their own tablet, they might actually be able to out-do Android on tablet sales!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The main factor is that no one has a Xoom, while iPhone and iPad have major markets.
Second to this but a major cause of it is marketing, which, however much one may despise it, should be a (real-world) company's number one concern. Apple markets brilliantly; no one's heard of Xoom. I was at Best Buy the other day (suspend the groans for a minute) and saw the Xoom display shoved in a dark corner of the store by the door to the musical instruments room. It was barely visible and no where near the other computers. The Apple section, however, is prominent and located centrally within the computer side of the building. That alone will make a major impact; the lack of mindshare that Android gets (except among the Slashdot OMGFREE! crowd, who are—face reality—a statistical anomaly) is directly responsible for that main factor.
Another major factor: Apple was first-to-market, so companies have already dedicated resources to building for IOS; Honeycomb isn't compatible, so that requires companies wishing to write for both to divide their resources and support two systems. Linux was always in that same boat: things came out for Windows, but no one felt like paying for more developer time to write a Linux port.
The real-world market is Apple's, and they earned it by performing well in real-world business tasks like marketing the hell out of their products and working with distribution chains to ensure visibility, and by innovating enough to open a new market and colonize it first. Until Android has the kind of support mechanisms that can do a good job marketing, it will remain an engineer's/geek's OS with correspondingly few apps. The first-to-market advantage that Apple has may be insurmountable.
It's a waste of time, money and effort writing apps for the handful of people with honeycomb devices.
If honeycomb had been released for all Android devices capable of running it rather then Google admitting that it is such a hack that they won't even release the source there might be the numbers and confidence behind it - but as it stands people are just waiting for it to be done properly in Ice Cream Sandwich.
Google succeeded in fragmenting Android even more.
of Honycomb devices.
Inexpensive, well-designed and comprehensivly specced devices would be nice too. (or is that a "one out of three" proposition?)
A lot of people don't develop for a platform that they can't test it on (emulator does not count) their hardware they already own (Samsung, Archos, THIS MEANS YOU!!), so as long as google refuses to release the source for honeycomb, i bet this wont change.
This seems like the worlds longest circular argument. The iPad had similar problems when it was released, but people bought it despite not knowing what the killer app was and because people bought it developers developed for it.
There are no Honeycomb apps, because there is a lack of Honeycomb tablets in the market. I don't know a single person with one, yet every second friend has an iPad regardless if they have a iPhone or an Android phone.
People aren't buying the tablets because reviews are negative usually always on account of a lack of apps for it.
And round we go again.
... just wait till your app is out in the wild, trying to run on dozens of very different devices. It aint pretty.
This does not surprise me. There is simply not enough actual hardware out there. I mean, more then enough idea's and prototypes. But nothing actually being sold in the stores or even online.
And I'm not talking about the absurdly priced Samsung type tablets, but normally priced GOOD hardware for around $300 through $400 range.
Show me good hardware that will run honeycomb now and one or two future versions for $350 and I'm aboard.
I posted almost 6 months ago complaining about searching in the market app. In the meantime, none of my complaints have been addressed. Given that Google is still primarily a search engine with a bunch of OSs, browsers, apps and features designed to steer people towards their search engine, I would have expected them to implement a better Market app.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2042754&cid=35526684
My final point still stands. Google does not want users to be able to easily differentiate between poor apps and high quality apps since they still won't allow you to sort results by number of downloads, rating, and a few other criteria I can think of. In the case of honeycomb I guess it's working against them.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.driftwood.galaxybowl&feature=search_result
I think the reason more tabs don't purchase it is there is no way to discover them in the marketplace. I'd love to be part of a minority for hungry tab owners, but right now it's invisible.
Android has been written from the ground up to support different resolutions / dpi. There is no need to write "honeycomb" specific UIs, because well written apps would have already moved things around for a higher resolution, lower DPI screen. Honeycomb brought "fragments" (reusable parts of the UI) to make it easier for developers to switch between screen types, and "Renderscript" (easier to make fancy looking UI)
Most of the apps that I use on my phone work well on a 10" screen, and some even reformat themselves (adding a side bar with commonly used controls, etc.). There are a few crappy apps that decide to use fixed pixel coordinates so they don't work (they are either uninstalled, or I email the dev about it and they fix it).
Factoring the above in: why would you reprogram to use HC when your app is already doing the same thing? That's why most of the HC apps are *NEW* apps taking advantage of fragments, etc., and not ones that have been scrapped and redesigned for HC. If you use HC features, you need to use reflection / second code path for Gingerbread / non-tablet devices support -- adding extra work.
Apps for the i-series devices had NO provision for higher resolution displays (most were using 320x480 or whatever the original res is), and therefore must have applications rewritten to take advantage of higher resolutions (blowing up 320x480 @ 3.5" to 1024x768 @ 10" = blur city. 800x480+ @ 4" to 10" is ok). Your options as a dev were either: your app looks like garbage (and therefore lower ratings), or your rewrite it (and count towards the "number of tablet apps").
TL;DR: Good Android apps already support higher res / lower DPI tablets without needing to depend on Honeycomb specific features. As such, it doesn't count towards "honeycomb apps".
Just last week, I went shopping for an Android Tablet (in Central Europe). The only Specs it needed to fulfill was to be on Honeycomb and to have UMTS onboard. And I wanted to have Hands-on-Test
I've been to over 20 shops and the only Tablets i found were the first Samsung Galaxy Tab - UMTS but no Honeycomb, one by Acer, no UMTS and an Archos tablet which had neither of my requirements.
Guess I'll have to wait until Samsung and Asus release their new tablets and hope, they actually hit the shelves.
The Honeycomb tablets currently in the market are expensive, many even more expensive than an iPad and yet less polished.
Trying to break into a market against a well-established player, when your product is more expensive, has less marketing and is lower in quality isn't going to work
I myself have some really nice ideas for Honeycomb, tablet optimized apps but am holding off from developing them until the platform gets some traction.
It might very well be that Honeycomb is this beautiful, hard-working, honey-making bee of the mobile OS world, but if hardware makers persist in sticking it on top of turds and hopping it sells, Apple is going to dominate the tablet market for the next 20 years.
Almost all applications that run on 2.x also run on 3.0 because it's the same JVM.
Apple used the same trick with the Ipad by including the number of Ipod applications that would run on the Ipad without modification. Why does Google not get this free ride.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It's a lot harder to make money writing Android apps. That's not to say that it's impossible, but the users aren't as ready to open their wallets for a good app as iPhone users are, and advertisers don't pay as much. The incentive just isn't there.
I went to Best Buy and on display were the Xoom, the new Galaxy Tab 10.1, and the iPad 2.
Scrolling around, web browsing, and other things, the 2 android tabs were choppy. iPad was smooth as silk.
Looking at the shell, the 2 android tabs have a lot going on. That's confusing. iPad is just a bunch of icons, but I get it.
The iPad 2 was way nicer to hold than the Xoom, though the Galaxy was, IMO, the iPad's equal in this regard.
Overall, the iPad 2 just feels like a refined device, and the Android tabs feel like, well, a Microsoft solution.
iPad 2 wins, and therefore gets the developers.
Can we please stop to give stupid nick names for software projects? Mango for WP7, Honeycomb for Android, and much more and more stupid nick names for each version of a software. Why not call it Android 3 and be finished with it? So anyone can follow such a head line "Why are there so few honeycomb apps", I thought, what, did they mean honeypot for virus and trojans?
It's one thing to name a software, because "Java based smartphone OS from Google" is not really nice. But then to name every each version of the software? Then you have so many names, you don't know anymore what is which version.
Android 5 is then Banana, and WP8 is carrot. I don't know what Honeycomb is anymore, was it Android 4 or 5?
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Perhaps they're obscured from view... in some sort of "Hideout" for Honeycomb-related things.
Its not like google lacks cash.
Why not just commission say 500 apps at 10k each to jumpstart the eco system?
The market issue is unbelievable esp for as company specialised in search
The very simple readon that there are so few applications is that it is quite difficult to make money in the Android market. Apart from hobbyists developers need to eat. Not to say that hobbyists don't need to eat too, but usually they have another job that provides that.
Unfortunately the free as in speech is often equivalent to free as in beer. No one can make a salary by giving beer away.
Anyone tried running the Android 3 emulator? It is dog slow. Completely unusable to test on.
Apple fanbois will buy anything Apple that releases, but for the rest of us tablets are nothing more than an expensive gimmick that don't replace anything that's out here already. Hence the high sales of iPads but not of other tablets.
A reasonably specified netbook can do anything and more that a tablet can do for less cost, it also allows you to run many of the same applications that you run on a desktop or laptop PC - so you can carry about the day-to-day applications that you use with you, rather than having to set up and use an "equivalent" application on a tablet.
Very few of us are jetting around the world enough to the point where the small format of a tablet in an airliner seat would be easier to use than a netbook, and a tablet is "just one more device" that you have to manage, synchronise email addresses and contacts, recharge, etc. etc.
I even remember clearly on here about 18 months ago when the fanbois were justifying their buying iPads and themselves saying that they are not designed to replace laptops or netbooks - therefore a tablet is still one more portable device you have to carry with you because there is no single device that does everything most people need to do.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I would guess the majority of Android developers do not own a Honeycomb device. That would mean the emulator should be good. But on its default settings, the emulator is very, very slow. Google "honeycomb emulator" and the top results will mostly be about its slowness. Someone recommended I increase its memory, and that did help out a bit, it's still slow but at least usable.
One of my apps has less than 1% Honeycomb usage, so it is not big on my radar screen. I recently noticed another has over 7% - my app that lets people iterate and search Microsoft Access databases on an Android phone. It's the only reason I revisited the dog-slow emulator and tried the increased memory trick. I saw my app was displaying correctly with Android 3.0, and was displaying correctly on the larger tablet-sized screen. So the primary concern went away - everything worked. I then looked to see if I could improve things for the tablet, and I saw I could, but have not implemented it yet.
There are really two things here with Honeycomb and tablets. One is the OS version. The other is the screen size. With 2.3 and less you usually have smaller screens, Honeycomb often has larger screen sizes. My concerns tend more to be toward dealing with the larger screen sizes properly than implementing some of the neat whiz-bang 3.0 features.
So I think some assertions that are being made about Honeycomb are a bit off-base. If I saw my app displayed poorly on a tablet-sized Honeycomb device, I probably would have fixed it and sent an update out already. It may not be Honeycomb-optimized, but at least I made sure it is Honeycomb compatible. Also, even if I do make those changes that make use of the extra screen space on the typical larger Honeycomb tablet, I don't have an intention at this time of specially marking the app as Honeycomb-optimized. So it still wouldn't count in these surveys, even if I did optimize it for Honeycomb.
For my two existing apps, as well as others I am working on, most of what I think about with tablets is using all that screen space, which is not connected to Honeycomb (version 3 over version 2) per se. That is what most Android app developers will be thinking about more than whatever new features are in 3.1 over 2.3, in my opinion. Honestly, I am currently more engaged with limitations the Android OS has rather than cool new whiz-bang features. For example, there is a 16 bit (i.e. 65536) sized identifier for dex files which I have recently bumped up against. Which you wouldn't easily know about, since their error message for it is pretty vague once you bump into it. I'm more focused on banging my head against this wall right now than the new animation features in 3.0. But different people are focused on different things.
They still haven't learnt C++.
"One would have expected an explosion of Android tablet apps like that seen with the iPad"
If as many or more Honeycomb-running tablets were being sold, then yes, one might have expected that. Aside from that, there seem to be the issues cited in other comments, to the effect that it's hard to find apps in the marketplace, the emulator runs slowly, and not every Honeycomb tablet has the same technical specifications. So it seems like making this explosion of Android tablet apps may be harder than making them for the iPad, while serving a smaller audience.
Who expected this explosion and why? What reason does anyone have to think these issues are being rectified?
Most PC apps are C ... Android is Java, which is not suitable for a PC. The reason iOS has so many apps is that it is a desktop class system with native C, so you can easily port Mac, Windows, Unix, and game console code. If iOS had no C, iMovie and GarageBand and Keynote and many other PC apps would not be running there yet. They are there already because they did not have to be rewritten.
As much as I hate to admit it, and I have more reason to champion Honeycomb than most since I wrote CoolNote which is clearly designed to appeal to both phone and tablet users, the emulator sucks. I *want* to optimise my apps for Honeycomb but 5 minute load times, 30 sec response times make this impossible. Its not the PC either as the other emulators are fine.
The only Galaxy Tablet users I've met who are actually pleased with the platform are the people who will force themselves to like the things they bought no matter what. They're also the type of people who will try and convince everyone else they love their new toys. After all if they can convince someone else they're justifiably pleased with their new toy then it must not have been a bad decision to buy it.
I'm sure there are some people out there not outraged by the fact the the second they invested in a tablet, Google informs them that the specs are too low to run the next generation of the software which will be due out soon, but in reality, most people were quite upset.
This was a major failure on Google and Samsung's behalf since the Galaxy Tab should have been released for developers only to get them started writing apps for the Android tablet platform. In reality, the the newer Honeycomb devices should have been the generation 1 device.
The end result is, tons of people heard all the hype about the Android tablets being the ultimate iPad Killer. Then they heard about how all these major sales numbers of the Galaxy Tab was based on how many hit the shelves, not how many got to actual consumers. Then they heard about how the Galaxy Tablet was so underpowered that it couldn't possibly run the next version of Android due out a few weeks after everyone just bought their Galaxy Tabs for Christmas gifts. Then they heard about how there were no programs for the Galaxy Tab because developers were having problems with it.
If Android Tablet and Honeycomb takes a long time to catch on, it'll be almost entirely because of the Galaxy Tablet.
The carriers don't like generic firmwares. Not only do they like to disable useful features, they also have to take a long time to negotiate deals bundling bloatware on devices. This makes them slow on the uptake for device software and even more slow on upgrades which often never happen to encourage people to buy new devices and extend their contracts.
Manufacturers also want people to buy new devices as well, so there is less incentive for new software on old devices.
Android apps scale a lot better than their iOS counterparts, because they were designed for multiple resolutions from the ground up. Because of this, nearly all of the apps designed for phones and games work and look great on and Android tablet.
I have had my tablet for two months now, and except for a very small number of extremely specific exceptions, I have never once come across a situation and said "there is no tablet app for this, and the phone app doesn't work".
I don't know why none of these articles about android ever bring up this fact. It always seems like they harp on and on about the number of tablet specific apps, without ever asking the question, why should an app have to be tablet specific in the first place? Like, look at Angry Birds. That is not tablet specific, but it has looked great on tablets from day 1. Or Google Skymap. I can name lots of other examples.
Your above post is totally misguided. IOS has no auto-scaling reflow capabilities whatsoever. This is a combination of the strange habit of many iPhone apps not using the standard iOS GUI toolkit, and iOS taking shortcuts.
As a result, for the vast majority of iPhone apps, running them on an iPad results in an ugly pixelated mess.
This is not true for Android tablets * at all *, because Android frameworks and applications are designed from the ground up to work on many resolutions, not just one "golden" resolution.
Honeycomb is half baked and not even open source. The open source bit means that there is limited entusiasm around the product. You will see this change after the first open source tablet android os with better hardware acceleration. Existing Honeycomb tablets are all high end and too expensive. We need low end tablets like we have low end smartphones.
Another thing is that tablets as a form factor isn't that great, it is too much in between a phone and a real computer. Most people benefit more from a combination of a laptop computer with the ease of use of the tablets. Tablets today is too much a large smartphone without the phone. The limitations of tablets are more apparant when you are outside of the Jobs distortion field.
If we get the "inexpensive" option sorted, then lithium fireworks could be a possibility. On the other hand, a hot device keeps you warm on cold nights. :-)
There are still coming out new phones and tablets with fucking 2.2! Not even 2.3, ffs...
1.6-devices are still being sold in stores.
The only few tablets being sold with Honeycomb are more expensive than the iPad 2. As much as I prefer Android over iOS, if you ignore politics, lock-ins, etc for a little while, iPad 2 is simply the better product for 95% of the population right now, because it has the apps and its UI is quite polished, AND it's cheaper than less polished tablets with less apps.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
...and there's only so much ground Unicorn horn and Pixie Woofle dust to go round - so there is a limit to how many they can make and sell.
Perhaps if Santa Claus could get the Easter bunny to get the enchanted elf assembly line to work overtime, things would be different, and every litte Peter Pottlemouse could own one!
So fly away Tinkerbell!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Does a cereal, even a tasty one, really need apps? You've got the box for entertainment, what more do ya need?
We have emulators for everything from the old 2600 and C64 right up to the Nintendo DS and PS2
For one thing, the CPU in a modern Android device is at least twenty times as fast as the CPU in a Nintendo DS. For another, DS emulators high-level-emulate the boot process; they just drop the executable image in memory and start the CPU. This doesn't work so well when an app needs to interact with other apps, as is the case in Android.
The trolls sure are busy, here and elsewhere ...
So why isn't google working on a proper x86 version of Dalvik VM?
I can emulate much faster consoles with unofficial emulators done by enthusiasts.
Consoles up through 2001 don't support multitasking. Each game has full control of the primary CPU, and no firmware is dynamically linked. This means emulators can skip emulating most of the system menu.
Apple gets round the problem by compiling code for x86 in order to run it in their iOS Simulator.
How does this interact with non-free binary-only libraries licensed from third parties?
Then how can the licensee of such a library be sure that the x86 binary and the ARM binary are functionally equivalent?
When the iPad came out, it had polish and the market to itself. This allowed it to grab a surprising toe-hold in a field that many thought futile. Android 3.0, by contrast, comes to market with a bit less polish and facing stiff competition. The field is no longer empty- Developers must decide whether to focus on Android, WebOS, iOS etc.
The iPad 2 builds evolutionarily on its first-to-market experience... Faster, but with no changes in the physical layout. As a result every iPad 1 app looks as good on the iPad 2 as it did on the original. If you develop for the iPad, you shoot for one resolution (1024 x 768) and one ratio (4:3). While there isn't a guarantee, future displays seem sure to maintain the same 4:3 aspect ratio with a doubling or tripling of resolution. In other words, the transition will be no more difficult than iphone 3 to iphone 4. Screen elements will be no larger or smaller... just the same or clearer.
Because Google doesn't control the hardware (for better or worse) it can't give the same guarantees. Thus, developers face multiple resolutions, e.g., 1024 x 600 (Galaxy Tab 7 and Viewsonic Viewpad) vs. 1280 x 1024 (Galaxy Tab 10.1, Motorola Xoom) and, at the same time, design for different aspect ratios, e.g., 16:9 or 16:10. This will only get worse when Ice Cream Sandwich throws smart phones into the mix. So... assuming you KNOW you're target audience is running a compatible version of Android... what resolution and aspect ratio do you go with? If you let Android do the corrections... can you expect your app to display with the polish you designed into it? The iPad's 4:3 aspect ratio may be limiting and imperfect... but its constancy allows design to move forward with certitude. If you're spending time and money to develop for a platform, you want to deliver something that looks good now, will look good later, and does so on tens of millions of machines.
I've tried several electronics stores in the Fort Wayne, Indiana, area, and none of them appear to carry the latest Archos products. Nor does Archos appear to advertise on U.S. television that its products are available for purchase over the web. So how is a prospective end user expected to become aware of Archos products?
you're saying that the reason Android music players haven't taken off is that people don't know where to buy apps?
Archos devices come with AppsLib, and users often install Amazon Appstore afterward. But a lot of big-name applications aren't made available on AppsLib, on Amazon Appstore, or as a direct APK download from the developer's web site. For example, the check deposit application from Chase Bank is exclusive to Android Market.
Remember, the iPod touch launched before the App Store did.
It also rode the coattails of the incredibly popular click-wheel iPod brand. What brand's coattails should Android-powered music players have ridden?
Also, pretty much everyone is getting a phone
Getting a phone != getting a smartphone. I generally make fewer than 30 minutes of mobile calls per month, mostly to arrange rides. (Longer calls can wait until I have access to a land line, which in my city has free local calls.) So I pay $15 per 90 days to Virgin Mobile USA for service on my Audiovox 8610 dumbphone. I'd have to pay five to fifteen times more for smartphone service with a minimum voice plan that provides over 10 times more minutes than I'll ever use.
Have you ever wondered why there are no Android music players? Google places some limits on them
It's not Google that places limits on the Archos 43 Internet Tablet as much as short-sighted developers who make their applications available only on Android Market, not on Amazon Appstore or on AppsLib.
Among my peers, all but two have some sort of smartphone. They routinely bust it out and use it when out and about for one thing or another. Only one has a tablet. To make matters more grim, despite having that iPad with him for hours and using his iPhone several times, and even his laptop several times, he only used his iPad once, and that was *just* so he could say 'look at my iPad'. He may have borught it with him multiple times, but he never borught it out again and no one asked about it again.
Meanwhile, a lot of manufacturers have fixated on tablet computing as the next big thing, more because Apple did it than actual good reason. It's frustrating to me as a consumer, because a lot of the important players in the phone market have to some extent seemingly are de-emphasizing advancing the smartphone market to chase the tablet. Google made a dead-end honeycomb release just-for-tablets, for example. HP seems to be putting the Touchpad above all else (I think this really hurt what remote chances they had at a comeback). All this to chase a market that hasn't achieved the pervasive status that smartphones did in the same time interval.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I can't speak for others - but here is my story. I have a software product that would be perfect for tablets. iPad market is pretty crowded and I'd love to go the Android route. My product is currently multi-platform and I can easily build it for Linux. It's a graphics-heavy application with fairly extensive UI. And therein lies a problem - I don't mind re-writing the entire UI, but Android requires me to do so in Java. Now, I don't know about you, but to me the though of building a complex UI in Java and having 100s of interfaces to/from it into native code seems simply terrifying. I've seen the "basic examples" and they are extremely convoluted and unmaintainable.
So my choice is to either write the entire product from scratch and in Java (no-go, don't even ask) or write a fully native Android product without UI (like game developers do it). Can't really go the second route, since unlike games - this application requires some amount of user interaction.
So, there you have it - I very much want to enter Android market, but technical design of that system (which to me seems braindead) - is a huge obstacle. It's not that it is impossible ot overcome. but the resulting product would likely be difficult to maintain and uneconomical.
On the other hand, I could easily develop similar product for iPad - but again, the money is not there anymore, too late for the party:)
note to self. self, don't work on web apps while moderating.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
<minirant>
With the death knell sounding for the N900 a friends I recently decided to buy a Xoom figuring that Android is where things seem to be heading. I have to confess that I've been rather underwhelmed by it. My current list of gripes are:
Aside from the Android-specific gripes there are also Xoom-specific ones (proprietary charging interface, a pain to root the device, highly reflective screen, ...). I really wanted to like this device but it feels like an uphill battle right now. It feels like the only way it beats my N900 is on screen size and CPU power; that may have been a niche device but it's still a much better user experience IMHO.
</minirant>
While it is very true that practically nothing uses the Honeycomb-specific Fragments UI, the simple tweak using an app called Spare Parts will scale pretty much every app to an appropriate size on a big tablet. Only the most sloppily designed apps don't scale well on my Galaxy Tab 10.1 (which has been well worth the three days after release of going from store to store to find at 32GB version in stock). Don't let the "lack" of apps keep you from buying a tablet. Again, the Spare Parts app fixes just about everything, and there's lots of tutorials on the web about how to do it, notably at jkkmobile.
Aside from one or two applications that I use (Touchdown being one of them), the apps on my Thunderbolt are exactly the same as the ones on my Acer Iconia. Most apps are smart enough to know when you're on a tablet and change their function (Shortyz for one).
There's only a few old apps that still assume you're on a phone and look horrible on a tablet, but they haven't been maintained for some time.
Sounds like excuses to me. Explain to me how your application is different to a game when it comes to user interface and explain how it would be easier in IOS to run native? They both have their challenges and it just sounds to me like you feel it would be easier to do nothing and just complain about it. If you have a compelling app all those other things don't matter and can be overcome. This really isn't a Honeycomb or tablet issue either. Contact someone who has done something similar as far as UI for native apps and move forward.
None of this stuff is easy, and at the same time if you really want to do it, it isn't that hard either.
There are so few Honeycomb apps because Honeycomb tablets suck and nobody is buying them
Numbers don't matter. I don't need hundreds of apps, or even "low hundreds". I need the apps that I actually use to work really, really well. This is how we should judge a platform, not the slush pile of wanna-apps that don't see more than 1000 installs.
Proposed solution: tech writers pick a basket of 20 most used apps -- let the crowd decide which ones matter. And evaluate those for UI, stability, etc. Then we can have a conversation about platform communities.
Since December 2010 you can do a Native Code Only Android application (revision 5 of the NDK). Basically, the only thing you are pointing towards as a show stopper for you hasn't existed on new/upgradable phones for 8 months now, and has never existed in Android's tablet OS, 3.x.
It comes down two four things:
1. The devices are abusively expensive, even my company cannot justify buying them for our engineering teams yet. This will change over time as the install base grows.
2. To say that the emulator sucks donkey ballz is a huge compliment. The first time most people see it running, they dont believe me when I tell them I'm running it on an intel core i7 with 16gb of RAM.
3. The fragmentation of Android just for handsets has made it a nightmare to support our apps on phones, let alone tablets. We're still waiting for the dust to settle a bit.
4. Handsets generally have more persistent network connections because they do WiFi and cellular data. Many tablets are WiFi only which means the usage scenarios include more possibility of no network connection. This means that apps that rely on persistent network have to be rethought, redesigned, and retooled to support offline modes more elegantly.
how many devices run honeycomb, I suppose a few hundred Thousand, and that's not enough to get lots of apps.
Your above post is totally misguided. IOS has no auto-scaling reflow capabilities whatsoever. This is a combination of the strange habit of many iPhone apps not using the standard iOS GUI toolkit, and iOS taking shortcuts.
I have been developing iPhone applications for many years now. How long have you been developing? How many iPhone applications do you have in the store?
The fact is that the auto-resizing works just fine. For any window, I can specify that any edge either can be a fixed distance from a containing edge, or expand as the view that contains it shrinks or grows. I can further specify that either the height or width is fixed, or is allowed to grow or shrink. It's as flexible s any GUI resize handling system I've ever used, across many languages.
The reason the iPhone had to have that at launch, and that developers would use it were many - for one thing, rotation means your views expand and shrink on the edges - but also things like call notices expand the navigation bar and shrink the containing view.
What confuses you is that most iPhone applications running on an iPad simply scale to 2x. But if a developer REALLY wanted to, they could simply declare the app universal and the application would properly expand to fill the iPad space using the specified view resizing constraints with no other code changes.
Of course almost no-one does that, because iPhone developers know an iPhone interface that simply scales to fill the screen looks like hell, at 2x or properly resizing. So no-one does it, while in the Android world few developers seem to think it matters and so you get very few apps taking proper advantage of the extra space.
There is one additional way in which you are wrong. If you have an image view that is holding an image larger than the view it is displayed in, on the iPhone it can be scaled down to fit in that space - but on the iPad it will actually use the "real" pixels in 2x mode to display the image in a higher resolution. Why they do not also do that for any system drawn text is a mystery to me...
As a result, for the vast majority of iPhone apps, running them on an iPad results in an ugly pixelated mess.
Which is why there are now over 100k apps built with the iPad in mind now, because no-one wants to use iPhone apps just scaled up (blocky or not) and everyone wants to put more thought into design of them. If Apple had simply said that apps by default would use auto-resizing to fill the iPad screen then the iPad would be in the same mess Android tablets are in where few things were tablet specific...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There's many reason why Honeycomb doesn't attract developpers
- first, most apps make money through ads since the average Android user won't buy any app ever, in contrast with iOS. "Apps cost nothing to make, heh ?".
For ads to make money, apps must be downloaded massively (> hundred of thousands). And there's lot more phones out there than tablets as phone are way more ubiquitous than tablets which remain an expensive toy.
The fact that most Android users just wouldn't buy Honeycomb apps is a real problem. Android user wants everything free. Android user won't have Honeycomb specific apps because of that, his fault.
- Making an app optimized for Honeycomb using its APIs is very time consuming. Most of the time you can easily adapt an existing phone app so it scale and handle appropriately on Honeycomb without using Honeycomb custom APIs. That's a great difference with the iPad, on which most iPhone app looked like crap because of no modern layouting taking into account scaling.
On Honeycomb, the new Fragment APIs are kind of complicated and require a lot of refactoring which some developpers may be reluctant to do for various reasons. At this point you'd better write the app UI twice, externalizing the app logic in Library.
So at the moment it makes no sense to write Honeycomb specific apps: it is too much work for too little benefit. Now if the number of tablets grows significantly it might change but nothing is certain.
-- il fait bo
Many Android apps work fine on bigger screens, so there is no need for a separate "HD" version. The HD version of iPad apps is really a boondoggle.
up until recently there was only the xoom, which was $800.
There are three more reasons that there are so few apps for Honeycomb:
1. Super slow (practically unusable) Honeycomb emulator (that Google is working on, and even demoed a pre-alpha version at google io, so hopefully this will come soon).
2. Honeycomb tablet users are not allowed to leave ratings on the Market directly from their Honeycomb tablet (otherwise, the most incompatible and the most popular apps would have been flooded with negative ratings, and I'm sure that the developers of popular apps would have done something to maintain their good ratings).
3. Most android developers have been flooded with information on how they can optimize their existing Android application, all good information of course, but I don't think all of them realize yet that changing just one line of xml (namely the android:targetSdkVersion attribute to 11 in their manifest file and leaving the minSdkVersion number to the same as before) may just be all they need to do -- to keep the new Honeycomb users happy (and sure, this tiny change will not give them the nice Honeycomb menu/the action bar, nor will it reorganize the layout into fragments for them, correct any accelerometer game defaults, or even turn their assets into super-high resolution tablet graphics), but at least that should help make their app use the entire real estate of the screen, instead of a tiny little part of it -- which is my biggest gripe right now with some of the Android apps that I still use everyday).
PS: Technically, it's more than one line if you count the fact that you have to increment your android:versionCode counter as well (which is something you have to do anyway anytime you change something in your code, that's why I'm already assuming an android developer already knows about that part).
Not an issue if you only use FREE software.
iOS is not free software, and neither is Honeycomb. In fact, all versions of Android include patented MPEG decoder software. Does there even exist an operating system that comes on handheld devices sold in the United States and is 100% conformant to DFSG?
...the possibility that you *can* write an app that works well on a phone or on a tablet, without a special release for different devices?
we are just coo-coo for coco puffs.
iOS/Android dev here. I recently got ahold of a Galaxy Tab 10.1 and discovered that my app did not behave well at all on Honeycomb and sometimes crashed. It also didn't react well to the way Honeycomb does rotation. This is after having tested the app on a dozen different Android phones. I've seen some other apps that work fine on 2.2 and aren't functional on the tablets, so it seems like a bit of a crapshoot.
Anyway I fixed it up and sent the right mails to the right people and got reviews for tablets in two large android sites. This amounted to 150 free copies being downloaded. For comparison in the same time period we did 5-10k free copies for Android phones. It seems like it wouldn't be a good idea to do a Honeycomb-only app right now unless you can somehow guarantee making it onto the featured tablet apps list. On the other hand, the original non-honeycomb galaxy tab is our third biggest userbase on android.
Mandatory shameless plug for the app: Big Mountain Snowboarding.
Ignoring politics is the wrong decision particularly in a discussion involving honeycomb. Check out the forums at tabletroms.com and you'll find that the notion ink adam is far and away the most popular tablet among enthusiasts - the group containing the largest amount of current and potential developers. There's no honeycomb for the adam or for that matter most of the other tegra2 tablets which are equally capable to the motorola xoom. Android has a great position in the market because up to now google hasn't resorted to the bullying and special treatment of other platforms. Google has failed to realize that this fair treatment and openness is a key to their success before honeycomb, and this failure is having a large impact on the success (or ultimate failure) of their current version.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
.... because you did a dumb "hello world" demo and other guy only try to do some REAL work.
Are fanboys really this stupid?
Android is so fragmented that if you walk into a local smartphone store and you will find models with Android from 1.5 all the way to 2.2 (it will be a miracle if you find one with 2.3). The out of them, only one or two will get an update, but never to the current version.
And please, lets not talk about the stupidity of downloading and installing ROMs posted in unknown/questionable websites or forums by "anonymous" groups.
$600 for a xoom could have anything to do with it?
I have been in best buy a few times to see what android tablets are out, I find the ones that people are buying are 2.2 based and that seems to be the majority, the only 2 Gingerbread ones were more expensive that the ipad. So the average consumer is going to go with ipad or 2.2 tablet out of a cost differential with 3.0 . The market place could stand to make it easier to find tablet apps.
Seriously, unless a bee lives there, or its a brand of cereal that has a bee for its spokesman, I am not aware of it.
I consider myself fairly well versed in technology and technology news, so if I am asking wtf it is, I bet your average consumer has zero clue. So if your selling it as a feature, it is one that no one is aware of or cares about.
This issue is already answered and it's because developers are waiting for ice cream sandwich wich will come in the 4th quarter and will make one app run on all android devices.
Ice Cream Sandwich is the forthcoming version of Android that Google said will become available in the fall of this year.
Ice Cream Sandwich offers one key benefit over Gingerbread and Honeycomb - it combines the two.Ice Cream Sandwich will be a master version of Android that draws upon features of both Gingerbread and Honeycomb.
This is relevant because developers will, in theory, only have to write applications once to run on both Android smartphones and tablets.
As it stands today, developers have to create their applications for either Gingerbread (smartphones) or Honeycomb (tablets), and then adapt to the other.
Not so with Ice Cream Sandwich.
Developers may be waiting for Ice Cream Sandwich and its associated SDKs/APIs to become available before fully targeting the Android tablet market.