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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."
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.
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.
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.