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Microsoft Rumored To Integrate Android Apps
phmadore writes "Windows Phone has been struggling for market share, largely due to a serious lack of developers willing to invest their time in what one might consider a niche market. Statistically speaking, Android has more than 1.1M apps to Windows Phone's 200,000+. Well, according to unnamed sources informing the Verge, Microsoft may soon integrate/allow Android applications into both Windows and Windows Phone."
This follows the recent debate over whether Microsoft should try to fork Android. Peter Bright made the point that doing so would be extremely difficult, and probably not worth Microsoft's time. Ben Thompson has an insightful post about how Microsoft's real decision is whether to focus on devices or services.
Statistically speaking, Android has more than 1.1M apps to Windows Phone's 200,000+
Thanks for clarifying how you were speaking, or I would have no idea how to compare those two numbers!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
As a Windows Phone user I think this is a terrible idea. Didn't BlackBerry already try this? Did it help them? I don't think so. It is a slippery slope that only leads to irrelevance.
The beauty of Windows Phone is that it is not like Android and iOS. Well written WP apps, which follow the Metro (I know they don't call it that anymore) design philosophy integrate beautifully into the environment. Slapping Android apps, which follow very different conventions would diminish the user experience.
Code to live, live to code.
The trick with 'Android compatibility' is that it's really two different problems. One is merely engineering ('merely' in the 'may actually be quite difficult; but there are engineers that are quite smart, trying giving them money' sense) and one is strategic:
'Android' as in the ASOP is a mixture of GPL and Apache. Exactly how many man-hours it takes to get ASOP running on your platform, or Dalvik and friends running on your non-Linux kernel is an open question, and may end up being quite a few if you want it to work well; but there is nobody to stop you, and you just need suitably skilled software people.
Trouble is, much of the good stuff in 'Android' (and stuff that Google doesn't exactly discourage developers from using) isn't ASOP, it's Google Play Services, a set of proprietary applications, libraries, and Google-backed web servcies that can be bestowed or denied to your device at the power and mere pleasure of Team Mountain View. They tend to ignore indie ROM-cookers and two-bit pacific RIM clonemongers who quietly pirate GPS; but if a company large enough to target, or ambitious enough to try to cut deals with major carriers in markets Google cares about, tries to distribute GPS without Google's blessing, it's world-of-hurt time.
At a greater or lesser cost in software engineers, you could get an ASOP-compatible Android compatibility layer running on QNX, NT, OSX, whatever. However, how much that helps you is increasingly limited.
Windows 3.1 and Win32S ran well in OS/2. What killed OS/2 in the end was that they had no access to the full Win32 API being used in Windows NT, and when Chicago/Windows 95 adopted the (nearly) full Win32 API suite, developers decided Microsoft, with its vast OEM network, was going to be the winner and abandoned any notion of supporting OS/2. I remember the last floundering days of OS/2 Warp 4, when IBM put out both a browser and an MS-Works-like office suite, as well as some sort of Win32 migration layer to the OS/2 32 bit API in the hopes that they could lure developers. Sadly, even by the mid-1990s, when my involvement with IBM as a VAR ended, Word and Excel had sufficient penetration that that last ditch attempt fell on its face, and OS/2, for all its advantages was relegated to a slow death.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When OS/2 was struggling for market share, IBM decided that they could bring along more customers by allowing Windows programs to run on OS/2. So they put a whole lot of effort into it and the result was a disaster. The few programs that used to have an OS/2 version no longer did. The program maker didn't see a reason to make an OS/2 version if their Windows version ran on OS/2 too. And customers saw that Windows programs ran better on Windows than on OS/2, so why buy an OS/2 machine if all of the programs you want to run, run better on this cheaper Windows machine?
Maybe not yet, but just wait until you turn it on.
That's not how it fucking works, lol. You even specified "profits" which makes even less sense. Profit is a fixed value of realized net gain. You can't have more than 100% of it, and you can't have less than 0% of it. You can't conflate Company B's LOSS with another's PROFIT to determine the MARKET's PROFIT. There's a reason we separate out PROFIT and LOSS.
Here's an example since I'm sure you still don't get it (you'll probably REFUSE to get it since you linked to appleinsider.com ).
Company A: $6 Profit
Company B: $4 Profit
Company C: $0 Profit/Loss
Company D: $5 Loss
Market X had a PROFIT of $10 AND a LOSS of $5 ACROSS Companies A, B, C, and D.
You never talk about a MARKET's Profit or Loss as a whole, you talk about its REVENUE, or its Profits ACROSS those Companies which were Profitable, and losses across those which bleeding.
Company A got 60% of the Profit, Company B got 40%.
Company D made up 100% of the Loss.
Company C broke even.
You absolutely do not fucking count it as $5 Profit across the Market with Company A getting 120% of the Profit and Company B getting 80% (and Company C getting -100%).
Profit is not a fucking vector. It is always positive. You cannot conflate Profit and Loss and flip the fucking sign.
So why do Apple shits like to report it this way? Because they're fucking morons who read a table and don't understand what the numbers mean, or they simply want to see Apple have a larger number so they purposefully concoct bullshit like this.
With 87% and 30%, assuming no other profitable players, you're really dealing with 74.36% and 25.64%.
Furthermore, your link says 56% and 53%, not 87% and 30%. With 56% and 53%, you're really dealing with 51.38% and 48.62%.