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Wozniak To Apple: Consider Building an Android Phone
snydeq writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has some advice for Apple CEO Tim Cook: consider offering a phone based on the rival Google Android platform. Speaking at the Apps World conference in San Francisco, Wozniak made the suggestion of an Apple Android device when responding to a question about the fate of the faltering BlackBerry platform, saying that BlackBerry should have built an Android phone, and that Apple could do so, too. 'BlackBerry's very sad for me,' Wozniak lamented. 'I think it's probably too late now' for an Android-based BlackBerry phone. Apple, Woz said, has had some lucky victories in the marketplace in the past decade, and BlackBerry's demise may provide a cautionary tale: 'There's nothing to keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market.'"
There's nothing to keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market.
Of course there is. Apple isn't allowed to distribute copies of Android to the public except under license from Linus Torvalds, Google, and other contributors to Android. If Apple accepts the license of Android (mostly Apache v2 and GPLv2), it has to give the public an implicit or explicit license to patents that Apple holds that Android allegedly infringes. So unless Apple wants to end up dropping lawsuits against Samsung, it has to refrain from making an iDroid.
There are a lot of snarky comments in the “fuck beta” threads right now, and reading what little has been posted by soulskill, the admins actually think that they are being unfairly targeted by a mob mentality. This is a problem because the issues here will likely get managerial attention at Dice soon and if the executives see what looks like a bunch of juvenile shite in the comments, they are likely to buy into that false world view. If that happens, then Beta will be pushed through and Dice will think of themselves as victims of Anonymous or whatever.
For this reason, I wish to lead a call for all users to spend the time from now until the boycott on the 10th to repost this as soon as a new story is posted.
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Dice: Frankly, many of us want a new design, Classic is broken in so many ways. But beta is terrible, and this is what is wrong:
* The value that Slashdot brings to its users is not in its articles. Frankly, the articles are terrible. The value that Slashdot provides is a discussion forum for self-selected nerds.
* As such, it is vital that you remember that the community is not just an audience, it is also your primary content creator.
* Your new redesign does not allow the community to create (or even consume) content because:
- It makes it impossible to follow discussions in the comments sections. This is largely because of the max-width on window and the fact that of the space left over is taken up by a useless sidebar. The vertical spacing is also overdone.
- Slashdot has a fragile but effective moderation system. Your changes make it impossible for readers to leverage that system to read a high quality discussion and ignore the trolls.
- It disregards conventions of the community. UIDs matter. We’re nerds. We understand that you need to attract a younger audience, but for a lot of us (including the younguns) it is thrilling to see a post from somebody who has been there from the beginning.
* In the last 24 hours Soulskill has bitterly commented that the community has been involved since October and that they also get emails supporting the new design; only the comments are an echo chamber. This comment demonstrates a deep incompetence in your development team. Soulskill should have been citing A-B testing numbers. A-B testing is cheap, easy and effective but instead you are taking stabs in the dark.
* Your ability to attain user acceptance is dismal. A number of years ago, when Taco needed to modernize the site, he solicited the community for designs, and awarded the best designer and used that design. That is how you leverage a community and gain their acceptance: incorporate them in the design process. As a bonus, you won’t have utterly useless redesigns that will either ruin your website or have to be scrapped.
I have a hopefully coherent thread written here which could be a point of discussion assuming enough people want it on the front page as a stand alone article.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Wozniak has ruffled feathers before, in fact many times. This post concerns merely one issue though.
That is why, even as a longtime apple 2 -> Mac - OS X -> iOS pro developer I admire him for his candor when he slams Apple.
Usually he is right, even if he attacks his own investments, both financial or intellectual.
The best time he attacked apple was back around 1991 or 1992, when in a little publicized shaming of Apple, he complained about Apple's near retarded renaming of names and macros in the header files so that everything you compiled year to year would continually break. Including... THE ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE interface headers!
I had 500 kilobytes of hand crafted assembler and I got so sick of apple ruining my life with capricious and continual spelling changes (they foolishly use way too many abbreviations, and then gradually add more letters over time, like microsoft)... that I made my own headers for assembly language based off frozen header forks.
That way my stuff can always assemble and compile for many many years. This was for a variety of products with over 500,000 paid for licensed copies.
When wozniak bitched about the header utter disrespect at apple, I was so happy to have him in my corner.
Truthfully, Apple source code headers have always been 4 times more logical and better than microsofts, but in OS X they at least have various mechanisms to allow older code to compile with newer headers, with over 5 year overlap, if not 7. Also in OS X there are tools that can extract headers from apps or from the entombed headers in ".framework" files. So the header horror years are long over, except when bridging legacy mac, legacy windows, and Cocoa all into one huge namespace. ... i am digressing...
Breaking it year to year was foolish and wozniak called apple on it, for apple hiring morons.
Wozniak was always semi approachable, and I also like the fact that one of two of wozniaks non personal phone lines was always listed and publicly accessible in his den his whole career, for the polish joke on the tape he left. Many I know called it up in the late 70s early 80s. I was thrilled to see the thing in the recent movie "Jobs". Truthfully, Steve Jobs too, except in person on the sidewalk, was also very very openly approachable, primarily via beth or his other secretaries as intermediaries. And steve was far more humble than biographers give credit. In mid 2000s he drove his own kid to school every day on the way to work, not too many fathers did that.
I was very interesting in reading what the slashdot crowd would have to say on this topic and on the opinion of Woz. However:
1. The slashdot crowd is too pissed of with Beta, so all they do is keep complaining about it, and,
2. If they didn't complain and Beta was rolled out in silence then I would still not be able to read what the slashdot crowd had to say on the comment of Woz, because the discussion section of Beta sucks.
So, pretty please, with sugar on top, take back the fucking Beta.
>> Android works, but iOS is superior
Not at all. My girlfriend has always been a hardcore apple fan/iPhone user. I've tried using her iphone 5 just to do some relatively simple stuff several times now and always ended up giving up and giving it back to her to get done whatever I needed to do. I think the iPhone user interface is highly unintuitive and a fundamentally terrible design. The screen is also tiny and poky. Since she has seen and tried using my (now relatively old) Samsung S3 even she, the diehard apple fan, can't wait to buy an android phone next.
I've been a mostly C/C++ embedded software dev. for 30 years and recently wrote my first Android phone app. Most of my career has been doing embedded programming on many different platforms and I have to say that eclipse + ADT is probably the slickest/best embedded development environment I've ever seen/used. Java is pretty easy too.
The reason I wrote the phone app was for a startup I'm helping with. We also need to do an iPhone app. To get our iPhone app on iTunes' App Store will be an absolute frickin nightmare compared to the ease of getting our Android version on the Play Store and all the early signs are that the Objective-C/iOS API will be much more of a pain in the ass than the Android API.
android provides two things:
- free, ready to go OS
- app ecosystem
apple already has both. using their existing OS incurs no additional cost. and it is a framework that they already know how to work around.
even if they wanted to make a dirt cheap phone based off of an iphone 3gs, it would be a matter of making hardware that would fit the bill as secondary market product. they ALREADY HAVE the os and ecosystem.
so WHY... in the WORLD... would apple do that? why in the world would woz say that?
and i come at this as a pc user with an android phone... this is truly mystifying.
To get our iPhone app on iTunes' App Store will be an absolute frickin nightmare compared to the ease of getting our Android version on the Play Store and all the early signs are that the Objective-C/iOS API will be much more of a pain in the ass than the Android API.
I know both the Android and iOS APIs.
There are some things each API does better than the other. And one is written in Obj-C and one is written in Java. HOWEVER...
The iOS API is much more consistent than the Android API. Sure, it's Obj-C. And you have to learn Obj-C. And you might complain that Obj-C is new and different and not Java (which does NOT make it a bad language. Different != bad.) But if you know Obj-C, and if you know Java, the iOS API is just generally more sensible and easy to use. I would not define the iOS API as a pain in the ass. You'd call it a pain in the ass, but then again, I know it, and you don't.
The Android API has several advantages. The Activities concept is a nice thing the iOS 6 and later APIs are just starting to play with. But they also make several boneheaded decisions. Rotating the device creates a new activity? WTF? Fragments? Fragments are nice but they're window dressing on a broken concept that iOS at least got right the first time. And native code support on Android is... lacking. Yes, you can technically do it, but not without jumping through a lot of development hoops you don't have to with the iOS tools. It would be nice if Android at least shipped with some Neon optimization code paths. And low latency audio on Android? Nope, still not there. Great if you're playing back or recording an audio file. Not great for much else. And don't get me started on all the bizarre OpenGL issues that iOS doesn't have.
I don't mean to trash on Android too much. What I'm basically saying is I'm having trouble taking this seriously as a level headed comparison when it's basically "I spend a lot of time with Android, I know it, and I like it. I don't know iOS, and it seems totally crazy to me!" The iOS APIs are basically child APIs of what shipped in OS X, and from there what shipped in NeXTStep. A lot of developers have spent a lot of time with the APIs over the last 20 years. It's not like these are bizzaro APIs that came out of nowhere that have never been peer reviewed, iterated on and improved, or worked with for long periods of time. Which is more than I can say for the Android APIs.
That's why it's good (for Apple) that Woz isn't and never was CEO of Apple. He obviously has absolutely not the faintest idea what he is talking about marketing and business-wise. I use Android for my phone and tablet, just recently backed off of buying an iPad Mini for development because it was to expensive ... and even *I* get the value-add that the sophisticated iOS devices bring along.
Apple should stick right where they are, perhaps move in closer with the opinion leaders a little again. Like XCode for free and without registration, direct access to iOS devices and filesystem, direct deployment of apps to iOS devices and some other stuff that's pissing of the top 0.2 % expertlayer of computer users, i.e. us, with Apple. That would be about all the changes I would make if I were in charge.
The rest is going absolutely perfect for Apple, a fashion mindshare Google, Samsung, MS and others would kill for and bizar gros margins of 30%+ on post-PC devices included. Thinking of bringing Android into that picture makes me cringe - and I'm not even an Apple Fanboy.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca