Why Are There So Few Honeycomb Apps?

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday July 3, 2011 @06:48PM from the endangered-species dept.

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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Re:Well. The answer is simple. by shutdown+-p+now · 2011-07-03 21:44 · Score: 5, Informative

You should understand that there is a difference between how iPhone apps look on iPad, and how Android 2.x apps look on Honeycomb. On iOS, the app is not resized to fit the screen - at best, you can bitmap-scale it 2x, which looks ugly as hell. On Android, the UI designed using standard layouts is dynamic and reflowable, and so it actually resizes to fit. You don't end up with 2x-sized buttons and text and so on. You might end up with a lot of unused space, though, but that depends on the app. Some look meh, but surprisingly many end up looking very good. Most file managers, for example.