Slashdot Mirror
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."
Platform fragmentation - as in, different screen sizes etc., may be an issue but I don't know how bad it really is.
I'm developing an Android app; doing it exclusively on my own device; have tried the emulator but it is so slow! Takes some 10-15 minutes just to start up, and then literally minutes to start running my app after starting it out of Eclipse. Not to mention the sluggish performance in the emulator. Searching for solutions to this problem only resulted in many hits of people with the same problem.
So while I'd love to at least test my app on the "big screen", or even smaller screens for that sake (my device is double the minimum required), the shitty emulator makes it impossible.
This I can imagine will hold back many developers to optimise their app for the tablets, as it'd require them to buy the device. And if only that emulator would work properly I'd prefer to use it instead of my device, easier!
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.
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".
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.
That's a strange argument.
The market for smartphones is fragmented, yet most people don't seem to have a problem deciding which one to buy.
Fragmantation may be a problem from the technical perspective of a developer, but for consumers it means that they have a lot of choices, which is a good thing.
How many of us are holding off getting a tablet until we can easily bypass Android (of any flavour) and just load whatever distribution we want?
Hundreds, maybe even somewhere in the low thousands. And this is exactly the sort of reason there are so few Honeycomb apps: there's just not that much demand for Android tablets.
On the tablet, Android has to compete on a level playing field with the iPad. People don't particularly want Android. They don't particularly *like* Android. Not on the whole. But people *do* want iPads.
On the phone, the situation is pretty much the same, except that there are external factors involved. Specifically, carrier choice, service plans, and subsidies. Also, pretty much everyone is getting a phone, while not everyone is getting a tablet. These combine to give Android an artificial boost in apparent demand. I say "apparent demand", because the sales of Android phones don't really show the demand for Android specifically.
Have you ever wondered why there are no Android music players? Google places some limits on them, but as you are all so quick to point out, *anyone* can just take Android (pre 3.0, which is not suited for small screens anyway) and make their own version. If consumers actually *did* want Android, surely there'd be some demand, right?
But there isn't. And that's all right.
This brings up something the stereotypical slashdot Android nerd should come to understand. It's sage advice from your hated icon of evil, Steve Jobs. Paraphrased, you need to get over this notion that for Android to win, Apple/iOS has to lose. Android, like Linux, isn't terribly well designed for general consumption. Its strengths are very geek-centric. You should be happy that Android has found a viable market from which to offer hardware and software that meets your wishes. Macs don't have the market share MS has in the PC market, but they are more than strong enough to stick around providing me with the sort of computer I want. In the end, that's all that matters, right?
So, maybe if you guys come to accept that, you won't be stuck with this distorted view of Android, and you'll be happy with it how it really is, and not scratch your heads wondering why it's not something it will never be. Just like me (and tens of millions of others) with Macs, or you guys, with hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of Linux PCs, or even the hundred million Android phones and hundreds of thousands (again, *maybe* millions) of Android tablets, you can realize that what you have is pretty damned good for you, right now as it currently is.
Isn't that good enough? Isn't that what you really want? A toy, a geek toy, to play around with? You can call it a tool if you'd prefer, but if you're going to call an iPad a toy, at least be consistent about it.
I'm guessing no-one on this thread owns an Android tablet.
There is not a shortage of Honeycomb applications. The vast majority of 2.x Applications will run on 3.0 with no trouble. Some of the UI's are not made for 10" screens but that does not make the applications difficult to use at all. The TFA is just trolling for page hits (it's ComputerWorld, did you expect anything different).
Although I think Google does need to work on a resolution independent API for Android, the reported "dearth of applications" is vastly overblown for the reasons mentioned above. I've got a Honeycomb based Acer Iconia Tab and have got more applications on it then my HTC Desire Z (runs 2.3), but the ones I use most often are the inbuilt Google applications (Gmail, browser, Maps, Navigation) with the exception of flash (which absolutely flies but that's because it's connected to fast DSL via WiFi).
Probably WYSE would be the most used application that is not from Google but the web browser on Honeycomb is good enough that it eliminates the need for a lot of applications..
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Platform fragmentation from the hardware side isn't the huge issue it's made to be. Anyone who has developed desktop software shouldn't have a huge issue having to target a variety of devices! There are problems that you have to think about very small screens, as well as portrait/landscape display, but it's really not that bad IMHO.
From the software side, on the other hand, it's a right pain. Honeycomb adds the concept of a "Fragment", which is a re-usable UI grouping, so on a tablet you might put three next to each other left to right, but on a phone you display each Fragment as a single screen by itself. However, as no phone runs Honeycomb, this is basically useless; you have to write a Fragment based UI to make effective use of a tablet, and an Activity (or whatever) based UI for phones, so you have two UI layers. Once Ice Cream Sandwich comes out and phones start having Fragments, that will start solving this.
I'm curious to get the input from you or someone else that has done the necessary research on Android tablets as to which the "best one" is supposed to be.
The best one is the one that does the most things you would like to do, in a stable manner.
Right now, for most people, that would be the iPad. Apple has their shit together, and that just cannot be said of ANY Android tablet maker or even Google, at this point in time. They just passed something like 100,000 iPad-specific Apps in their store. I have friends who are anti-establishment types (big Android fans), who have published an iPad app, and won't even consider producing an Android version. As new developers, they want to be paid, and pragmatism is a very good idea.
Sorry, but until Google steps up and blesses a reference standard like a Nexus Tab or something, the Android tablet market won't have any "best" tablet. Until Google steps up with a real tablet SDK and a good emulator, the hurried and shoddy Android tablets will always take a back seat to the iPad.
On a side note, the history of Android and iOS devices should be considered when looking at this market disparity. Apple started with the tablet first, and shrunk it down into a phone. Sure, the iPhone preceded the iPad to market by three years, but the tablet touch interface was being developed for the better part of a decade before it was shrunk down for the phone. In both iPad and iPhone/iPod renditions, the devices were clean-sheet from the ground up. Apple got it right on the tablet, and then worked to get it right on the phone. The delay in releasing the iPad was most-likely due to needing the silicon to catch-up, so that the user experience wouldn't suck. Apple has fast emulators for both the iPad and the iPhone, and targeting either device with a common codebase is very easy.
Android, on the other hand, started out using the Microsoft Windows Mobile reference platform for hardware. The initial designs (pre-iPhone) looked much closer to Blackberries, than the now-omnipresent iPhone/Touch form factor. The first Androids were hobbled by their MS-designed roots with goofy memory management, and all Android manufacturers are still paying Microsoft for the privilege of using their crappy design. Android tablets grew out of this, with the added technical problem that any manufacturer could do whatever the hell they wanted to do. Until Honeycomb, all Android tablets used ugly (fragile) hacks to scale up phone interfaces. From Google's own admission, they did the same for Honeycomb, and won't be releasing the source because of it. Hopefully, they will eventually get it right.
-- Len
Yes. You're right. The millions upon millions of iPad users all over the world are all Apple fanboys with no capabilities of thinking in an individual capacity. The iPad is a failure just waiting to happen and netbooks will still come back and take over.
You keep telling yourself that. Please. Run with it.
When iPads came out, they created a new (or reinvigorated and old and dead) market. There was uncertainty in its capabilities outside of iHaters calling it an "oversized iPod Touch". Now, two years later the iPad has had a large penetration in vertical markets where before there were none for a tablet. Back then, perhaps it was correct to say that it is not meant to replace laptops or netbooks. Now though is a different story. I lost track of how many friends and colleagues that were looking for a new home computer or a laptop decided to buy an iPad instead. There is a huge, huge market for people that don't need the capabilities of a laptop/desktop PC and all the headaches that go with keeping one running. Tech-heads, geeks, and nerds hate that idea as Apple's model pretty much obliterates their definition of what computing should be like. I say it's about damn time. We've had decades of what was essentially garbage PC's devoid of any user-friendliness for the Joe-consumer. I think it's great that Apple saw how the PC-folks were screwing everything up and decided to make "computers" that hides the computer part from the user and just let's them use it like a toaster. Good for them.
It's the haters that try to convince everyone until they're blue in the face that the only "real" tablet is one that can be rooted. I can tell you right now that that kind of logic guarantees you'll lose 99% of your potential consumer base.
Take it from someone who owned two Honeycomb tablets (Xoom and Transformer), and now also an iPad 2: Honeycomb is unstable and buggy. Force closes are the norm. Music app crashes when playing any MP3 from one of the albums that I have. The whole thing is pretty slow - even swiping screens with icons left and right is slow, especially if you rotate the tablet from its "normal" orientation (landscape, camera near the top). On some websites - most notably, Slashdot when posting a comment - it's so horrendously slow as to be unusable, which is why I had to resort to Opera Mobile specifically for the sake of those websites; but it has its own problems.
In comparison, iPad is pretty limited in what it can do, but in practice I've found that 90% of the time I spend in the browser anyway, and the remaining is split between mail, games and books, all of which are available on both platforms (and good games in particular are more abundant on iPad - it has Civilization, a StarCraft clone, several good shooters etc). And on iPad, these all are silky smooth, so it ends up being the tablet of choice. That, and its battery life - it's 1 hour more even as far as specs go, but both Honeycomb tablets - and particularly Transformer - seem to leak it faster when sleeping.
That said, I'm still keeping Transformer around, hoping for one of the two things: either Google fixes responsiveness and stability issues in Ice Cream Sandwich (earlier I was hoping for 3.1, but it turned out to be a meh kind of update), or else we finally get a full-fledged Linux distro that can be installed on the thing - and then I'll get a nifty Linux tablet/netbook with loads of battery time (thanks to the keyboard dock). My overall feeling is that the latter is more likely at this moment...
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.