Google said as much. It's not great, but it's pretty clearly the case. Nonetheless, Honeycomb is clearly the most powerful, flexible and open of any tablet OS out there and most certainly what I'll be getting (if I ever get a tablet, which is another question).
Google has clearly been too ambitious with their schedule, that much is clear and pretty much accepted by everyone including Google who are quite open about it. If you want to be angry, sure, be angry about that. But don't try and twist that into some dark evil plot wherein Google is somehow intending to turn Android into a proprietary closed ecosystem.
It's amazing how you have every other player happily distributing their fully closed, never to be opened phones and there's hardly even discussion of it and Google who has faithfully open sourced every release of Android so far under one of the most permissible licenses available just delays release of source by a month or so and everyone screams as if it's the end of the world and Google is the borg.
What happens if you just buy and unlocked GSM phone and stick your SIM card from AT&T in it? (genuine question).
I understand if you insist on sucking on the credit teat of your carrier to get a phone on contract you're stuck with what they let you have and the conditions they put on it. But can't you just buy any international phone and start using it?
If I were choosing to develop for a platform, why would I choose one with only 5% of the sales?
It's interesting to see how people are clinging to old, out of date stats to defend the iOS platform.
The 5% number is based on last year. So what you say? So Android grew something like 800% last year. The Android market went from somthing like 10,000 apps to 200,000 apps. The demographics of people buying them went from leading edge geeks to normal consumers. Compare the beginning of last year to the end and you'll have orders of magnitude difference in just about every single metric, and yet people like to average the whole year as if that's valid.
Re: AT&T, they had not a single good Android phone and famously bad reception - no wonder Android users preferred different networks - unlike iPhone users in general, they had choice. We'll never know for sure but it seems quite likely AT&T were restricted from releasing good Android phones either internal choice or by some agreement with Apple. Now they have the Atrix and are changing their tune dramatically so we may well see some dramatic changes in Android adoption there.
So all these years that nuclear experts were telling us that these plants were safe because they would shut down automatically were basically a soft lie. While they are not going to go up like a nuke, they still can barely be controlled, can do horrific damage that might last hundreds of years and destroy whole regions of a country. I suppose the nuclear advocates will say this is all just fine but I think there's going to be a huge loss of faith now in anything else they have to say (which may be a bad thing for humanity since nuclear may be a highly useful / necessary power source for solving other problems the world has...).
It's not that easy to "invest" in your network... at some point you just run out of places to put cell towers. Why do you think AT&T has shocking coverage in San Francisco ? because they can't be bothered putting up a few more cell towers? No, because it takes literally years to get approval to put a new tower up and that is supposing you can find somewhere to put it at all. Negotiating access rights for space to put this things is hellish - and from the other point of view, what would you say if AT&T showed up at your house and announced they had just received permission to put a tower in your back yard, ruining your view? You'd fight it and stall it for years. Which is exactly what people do.
And Apple don't even have one monopoly or overwhelmingly dominant position yet.
Actually that was one of the thing that surprised me about Steve's arrogant and deceitful speech at the iPad2 launch - that he proclaimed that Apple in fact had a monopoly. He clearly stated that Apple had more than 90% tablet market share (a lie, but let's go with it) and then that no competitor could come close (ie. that the competitive market place was not functioning correctly for this market). So he's basically written his own petition to the FTC / antitrust folks asking for some intervention. I thought it was very curious.
There's also a whole class of applications where such "optimization" does nothing at all. So "optimized" and "can work" turn out to be exactly the same. So one could say that Android has tens of thousands of apps that are "optimized".
Using a tablet with a software interface designed for a phone is marginal at best.
On an OS like iOS that's true because it was designed on the premise of one single form factor and resolution (originally 320x480) - so obviously every app developer hard coded around exactly that spec and their apps totally suck when scaled up.
Android on the other hand has always presumed that people will have all kinds of form factors anywhere from 2 inch 180x240 screens all the way up to 4.3 inch 480x854 screens right from the start. The emulator supports switching to any number of different profiles to test with and embraces shipping different layouts and different graphics to suit different resolutions. Basically the existing stock of Android applications scales up far better than the original stock of iOS apps. They might not be "optimized", but most of them are totally usable and work just fine.
I would say that probably half the apps in the Android Market have UIs that are totally acceptable on a tablet and optimization wouldn't even do much to them even if it was applied. So we're actually talking about Android having ~100,000 apps and the iPad only 65,000.
And yet another reply along the same lines - Inkscape is wonderful.
I work with design artists who produce artwork using Illustrator and it's clear there are things they can do that I can't with Inkscape. But it is astonishingly powerful and frequently easier to use than Illustrator. We've developed a quite productive workflow where they export in SVG which I can then load into Inkscape so I can do small adjustments without the need to round trip through them. Inkscape allows you to only purchase expensive tools for the people who really need them while letting everyone else do small adjustments with something that is excellent and free.
My only real complaints are that there are really dumb and simple things that are inexplicably not supported... try drawing some lines with arrow heads and customizing them (colors, shape, etc) for example.
Yes, distributing hardware with software in it, is still distributing software.
I don't think this is right. Copyright doesn't protect distribution, it protects reproduction. The software would be reproduced onto the device before it ever arrived at Walmart. It just so happens in the internet age that distribution equates to copying since servers don't typically delete their source copy when someone downloads, but the minute you revert to transferring something in meat space you're back to distribution being different from copying.
Based on simple logic. More handset owners translates to more market purchases. I'm not sure why you would demand a source to believe such a simple piece of logic. Or are you proposing that there is a non-linear relationship here - new Android users are less and less likely to purchase apps than early adopters? I suspect if anything it is the opposite - early adopters were geeks who had no qualms using buggy / complex free alternatives and reaching out to the net for content. New users are much closer to general consumers who will happily spill $5 to make their lives a fraction easier.
If you really want a source, I suppose you could use me, although I imagine based on our interactions so far that's unlikely to satisfy you.
So did that change radically since the end of 2010?
That report is not about the "end" of 2010, it covers all of 2010, reflecting a period during which Android had something like 800% growth. Based on the growth trajectory of Android and the fact that Google opened the market for purchases to a huge number of countries only at the end of 2010 it is safe to say that nearly all the revenue reflected in that report would have come in the last few months. So yes, the picture has changed radically.
It doesn't really matter who keeps the difference. They will all see the injustice internally and eventually push absolutely any other advantage they can into alternative channels - if they can't differentiate on price then they'll do it on other aspects - maybe the iOS store will just not have the same range (if your margin is less by 30% then that's a whole swathe of content that goes from profitable to unprofitable) or they'll lock it down more (buy for iOS read ONLY on iOS, buy outside read anywhere), or whatever else. It may not happen for a while because they are all feeling their way through this and iOS still dominates revenue for now, but in the end it will.
That's not really true any more. Android got a reputation for that early on because its high proportion of geeks and lack of general consumer marketshare. In the last year that has changed radically - the dominant user of Android is now a consumer not particularly different to those on iOS. It's still not as lucrative for sure, but the old stereotype is not really valid any more and rapidly getting less valid as Android floods into the market.
You are making up the difference in scale - ridiculously so. I just finished deploying 50 apps to the Android market for a content publisher. These were direct ports of iPhone apps - apart from modifying some of the interactions to fit the native style on Android they are direct clones. They are also entirely content based - they are just mini-guides / books of offline content and photos.
So how does the revenue from the same apps on the two markets compare? Is Android 0.01 % of the iOS revenue as you claim? Or is it ten times better than you claim at 0.1%? Or is it 100 times better than you claim at 1%? Or is it 1000 times better at 10% or is it 10,000 times better than you claim at 100% of the iOS revenue? Well, the latter two are the closest - the same apps on Android bring in about 40% of the revenue of their iOS equivalents. Not as good for sure, but in truth your post is nothing but an uninformed troll.
Don't be scared of learning Java on Android. It is the most pleasant experience I've ever had with Java. Basically, Google threw out all the onerous libraries and instead you're talking to the Android framework which is far simpler and easier to work with. A lot of the Java fear and loathing that you read about is based on the ridiculous stack of libraries and bloat that accompanies Java web stacks. Android has none of that.
FYI - ironically, but perhaps tellingly, Florian M. is not in fact a lawyer, he just poses as one on the internet - something he's a little shy of admitting. So you don't need to be a lawyer to be a complete douche.
First: we don't know if these are the only potentially infringing files out there. These are just the only ones brought to public attention so far.
I think there is fairly good evidence that these *are* the only infringing files. This Florien Mueller guy who found them is a known serial FUD generator for Oracle. He publishes an article something like once a week that always boils down to nothing more than a list of the patents at issue flowered up with some descriptive language and then an ominous statement at the end about how dire everything is for Google and Android. This guy is clearly highly motivated for whatever reason to assist any way he can take Google down - I think he's positioning himself as a kind of self-styled Pamela Jones for the Oracle case, this time on the side of evil. So you can be absolutely sure he scoured the code base looking for anything he could call a violation and would most certainly have called out the most damaging material he could find. The fact that this is the most incriminating evidence he found points to a fairly good picture for Google.
No, people are not going to substitute their 10" tablet screen for their 24 inch desktop monitor and they aren't going to replace their full size keyboard with a touch screen equivalent.
The form factors are sticking around, but the devices will converge. The Motorola Atrix points the way, but it is only half way there. Cell phones are now powerful enough that they can fulfill 99% of daily needs. So a dock - and in the future wireless docking so that the dock itself is redundant - transforms it into a full size solution.
I think the reason most iPhone users struggle to understand the utility of this is that they've been deprived of multitasking for so long that they've actually adapted all their workflows to the assumption that they can only do one thing at a time on their phone.
I use the internet almost reflexively while on the phone. It's almost to the point of being a bad habit. Usually I'm talking over bluetooth so the phone is in front of me and I'm googling every things they say or looking up prices of things they mention or finding movie times or reviews or grabbing their profile from linked in so I can seem that little bit more informed about them (or to put it the other way, a little bit less rudely ignorant of everything I should know about them but blissfully forgot), or checking my calendar or adding appointments to it for things they mention.
I think once people get used to having the ability to multitask on their phones it will slowly come to be seen as an essential feature and network connectivity will be a presumption, so discovering that half the features on their phone are "broken" while their on a call will be a bit of a rude shock eventually.
Even in Aus the writing is on the wall for Nokia. Open up your average catalogue delivered in the mail - these things used to be filled with cheap prepaid Nokia phones. At least half that space is now Android. It makes me cringe a bit because most of the Androids are horrible Huawei crap but there they are, next to the Nokia dumb phones and almost as cheap and getting cheaper by the day, and incomparable in terms of the ecosystem you are getting even if the phone itself is crap.
I have 3 android devices in my home...none of them run the same version, one has google apps natively, one has a hack to get it and the other one I haven't even bothered with because its too much of a pain in the ass.
So what? The point of Android is that it deliberately supports all this variety with an OS design that accommodates it. The fact that you have 3 different versions of the OS which may or may not have custom skins in no way prevents someone from writing an app that targets all three. To the app developer it makes almost no difference what the 'skin' on your phone looks like.
There's an awful lot of FUD / BS / rubbish in the parent post.
Basically, you have tons of different devices you need to support, all with different hardware, resolution and features. They might or might not have changes made by the phone manufacturer and/or telcos. They might have physical keyboards or only touchscreen. Maybe multitouch on some.
None of which matters for any sensible application. Android provides all the tools you need to add resources for different resolutions, or if you don't want to, just ship hi res resources and it scales them for you. The SDK makes it trivial to target any subset of phones with particular features and your app just won't appear for phones that don't have them.
Camera on the back, maybe front too, or not at all?
This is identical to iOS, a platform you seem to think is wonderful.
Different API's supported by different versions of Android.. It's a nightmare.
A nightmare??? The first thing the SDK does when you create a project is ask you what API level you want to target and from that point on all the APIs are set up for you so that anything not supported by your target platforms is a compile error. Far from being a nightmare, it couldn't be more trivial.
it means you have to create and test your applications and games for every device and most likely make some changes and bugfixes to some of them.
Granted, you do usually need to test on real hardware for a variety of phones. But it's hardly what you suggest - having 3 or 4 devices is more than sufficient for an average app and Google's error reporting system gives you complete stack traces from the field so you can quickly track down problems with devices you don't have.
Take for example the popular Angry Birds game - the developers have outright said they just cannot support all the different Android devices.
Here you really jump the shark. The Angry Birds developers explicitly wrote a post about how great it was to develop for Android and the amazing number of devices they were able to ship to with relative ease. The only reason there is a "lite" version coming is because some devices are so old and slow they just can't satisfy performance and memory requirements, but that's simply a factor of being old. Your 1G iPod Touch won't run the high end games in the Apple App Store either.
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Google said as much. It's not great, but it's pretty clearly the case. Nonetheless, Honeycomb is clearly the most powerful, flexible and open of any tablet OS out there and most certainly what I'll be getting (if I ever get a tablet, which is another question).
Google has clearly been too ambitious with their schedule, that much is clear and pretty much accepted by everyone including Google who are quite open about it. If you want to be angry, sure, be angry about that. But don't try and twist that into some dark evil plot wherein Google is somehow intending to turn Android into a proprietary closed ecosystem.
It's amazing how you have every other player happily distributing their fully closed, never to be opened phones and there's hardly even discussion of it and Google who has faithfully open sourced every release of Android so far under one of the most permissible licenses available just delays release of source by a month or so and everyone screams as if it's the end of the world and Google is the borg.
What happens if you just buy and unlocked GSM phone and stick your SIM card from AT&T in it? (genuine question).
I understand if you insist on sucking on the credit teat of your carrier to get a phone on contract you're stuck with what they let you have and the conditions they put on it. But can't you just buy any international phone and start using it?
If I were choosing to develop for a platform, why would I choose one with only 5% of the sales?
It's interesting to see how people are clinging to old, out of date stats to defend the iOS platform.
The 5% number is based on last year. So what you say? So Android grew something like 800% last year. The Android market went from somthing like 10,000 apps to 200,000 apps. The demographics of people buying them went from leading edge geeks to normal consumers. Compare the beginning of last year to the end and you'll have orders of magnitude difference in just about every single metric, and yet people like to average the whole year as if that's valid.
Re: AT&T, they had not a single good Android phone and famously bad reception - no wonder Android users preferred different networks - unlike iPhone users in general, they had choice. We'll never know for sure but it seems quite likely AT&T were restricted from releasing good Android phones either internal choice or by some agreement with Apple. Now they have the Atrix and are changing their tune dramatically so we may well see some dramatic changes in Android adoption there.
So all these years that nuclear experts were telling us that these plants were safe because they would shut down automatically were basically a soft lie. While they are not going to go up like a nuke, they still can barely be controlled, can do horrific damage that might last hundreds of years and destroy whole regions of a country. I suppose the nuclear advocates will say this is all just fine but I think there's going to be a huge loss of faith now in anything else they have to say (which may be a bad thing for humanity since nuclear may be a highly useful / necessary power source for solving other problems the world has ...).
It's not that easy to "invest" in your network ... at some point you just run out of places to put cell towers. Why do you think AT&T has shocking coverage in San Francisco ? because they can't be bothered putting up a few more cell towers? No, because it takes literally years to get approval to put a new tower up and that is supposing you can find somewhere to put it at all. Negotiating access rights for space to put this things is hellish - and from the other point of view, what would you say if AT&T showed up at your house and announced they had just received permission to put a tower in your back yard, ruining your view? You'd fight it and stall it for years. Which is exactly what people do.
And Apple don't even have one monopoly or overwhelmingly dominant position yet.
Actually that was one of the thing that surprised me about Steve's arrogant and deceitful speech at the iPad2 launch - that he proclaimed that Apple in fact had a monopoly. He clearly stated that Apple had more than 90% tablet market share (a lie, but let's go with it) and then that no competitor could come close (ie. that the competitive market place was not functioning correctly for this market). So he's basically written his own petition to the FTC / antitrust folks asking for some intervention. I thought it was very curious.
There's also a whole class of applications where such "optimization" does nothing at all. So "optimized" and "can work" turn out to be exactly the same. So one could say that Android has tens of thousands of apps that are "optimized".
Using a tablet with a software interface designed for a phone is marginal at best.
On an OS like iOS that's true because it was designed on the premise of one single form factor and resolution (originally 320x480) - so obviously every app developer hard coded around exactly that spec and their apps totally suck when scaled up.
Android on the other hand has always presumed that people will have all kinds of form factors anywhere from 2 inch 180x240 screens all the way up to 4.3 inch 480x854 screens right from the start. The emulator supports switching to any number of different profiles to test with and embraces shipping different layouts and different graphics to suit different resolutions. Basically the existing stock of Android applications scales up far better than the original stock of iOS apps. They might not be "optimized", but most of them are totally usable and work just fine.
I would say that probably half the apps in the Android Market have UIs that are totally acceptable on a tablet and optimization wouldn't even do much to them even if it was applied. So we're actually talking about Android having ~100,000 apps and the iPad only 65,000.
And yet another reply along the same lines - Inkscape is wonderful.
I work with design artists who produce artwork using Illustrator and it's clear there are things they can do that I can't with Inkscape. But it is astonishingly powerful and frequently easier to use than Illustrator. We've developed a quite productive workflow where they export in SVG which I can then load into Inkscape so I can do small adjustments without the need to round trip through them. Inkscape allows you to only purchase expensive tools for the people who really need them while letting everyone else do small adjustments with something that is excellent and free.
My only real complaints are that there are really dumb and simple things that are inexplicably not supported ... try drawing some lines with arrow heads and customizing them (colors, shape, etc) for example.
Yes, distributing hardware with software in it, is still distributing software.
I don't think this is right. Copyright doesn't protect distribution, it protects reproduction. The software would be reproduced onto the device before it ever arrived at Walmart. It just so happens in the internet age that distribution equates to copying since servers don't typically delete their source copy when someone downloads, but the minute you revert to transferring something in meat space you're back to distribution being different from copying.
I have no problem with you saying the Apple App Store is bigger / better / has more revenue. It does, and will continue to for a long while.
Just don't spread ridiculous FUD about it it bing 10,000 times bigger than Android.
Based on simple logic. More handset owners translates to more market purchases. I'm not sure why you would demand a source to believe such a simple piece of logic. Or are you proposing that there is a non-linear relationship here - new Android users are less and less likely to purchase apps than early adopters? I suspect if anything it is the opposite - early adopters were geeks who had no qualms using buggy / complex free alternatives and reaching out to the net for content. New users are much closer to general consumers who will happily spill $5 to make their lives a fraction easier.
If you really want a source, I suppose you could use me, although I imagine based on our interactions so far that's unlikely to satisfy you.
So did that change radically since the end of 2010?
That report is not about the "end" of 2010, it covers all of 2010, reflecting a period during which Android had something like 800% growth. Based on the growth trajectory of Android and the fact that Google opened the market for purchases to a huge number of countries only at the end of 2010 it is safe to say that nearly all the revenue reflected in that report would have come in the last few months. So yes, the picture has changed radically.
It doesn't really matter who keeps the difference. They will all see the injustice internally and eventually push absolutely any other advantage they can into alternative channels - if they can't differentiate on price then they'll do it on other aspects - maybe the iOS store will just not have the same range (if your margin is less by 30% then that's a whole swathe of content that goes from profitable to unprofitable) or they'll lock it down more (buy for iOS read ONLY on iOS, buy outside read anywhere), or whatever else. It may not happen for a while because they are all feeling their way through this and iOS still dominates revenue for now, but in the end it will.
Because Android users don't tend to buy content.
That's not really true any more. Android got a reputation for that early on because its high proportion of geeks and lack of general consumer marketshare. In the last year that has changed radically - the dominant user of Android is now a consumer not particularly different to those on iOS. It's still not as lucrative for sure, but the old stereotype is not really valid any more and rapidly getting less valid as Android floods into the market.
You are making up the difference in scale - ridiculously so. I just finished deploying 50 apps to the Android market for a content publisher. These were direct ports of iPhone apps - apart from modifying some of the interactions to fit the native style on Android they are direct clones. They are also entirely content based - they are just mini-guides / books of offline content and photos.
So how does the revenue from the same apps on the two markets compare? Is Android 0.01 % of the iOS revenue as you claim? Or is it ten times better than you claim at 0.1%? Or is it 100 times better than you claim at 1%? Or is it 1000 times better at 10% or is it 10,000 times better than you claim at 100% of the iOS revenue? Well, the latter two are the closest - the same apps on Android bring in about 40% of the revenue of their iOS equivalents. Not as good for sure, but in truth your post is nothing but an uninformed troll.
Don't be scared of learning Java on Android. It is the most pleasant experience I've ever had with Java. Basically, Google threw out all the onerous libraries and instead you're talking to the Android framework which is far simpler and easier to work with. A lot of the Java fear and loathing that you read about is based on the ridiculous stack of libraries and bloat that accompanies Java web stacks. Android has none of that.
FYI - ironically, but perhaps tellingly, Florian M. is not in fact a lawyer, he just poses as one on the internet - something he's a little shy of admitting. So you don't need to be a lawyer to be a complete douche.
First: we don't know if these are the only potentially infringing files out there. These are just the only ones brought to public attention so far.
I think there is fairly good evidence that these *are* the only infringing files. This Florien Mueller guy who found them is a known serial FUD generator for Oracle. He publishes an article something like once a week that always boils down to nothing more than a list of the patents at issue flowered up with some descriptive language and then an ominous statement at the end about how dire everything is for Google and Android. This guy is clearly highly motivated for whatever reason to assist any way he can take Google down - I think he's positioning himself as a kind of self-styled Pamela Jones for the Oracle case, this time on the side of evil. So you can be absolutely sure he scoured the code base looking for anything he could call a violation and would most certainly have called out the most damaging material he could find. The fact that this is the most incriminating evidence he found points to a fairly good picture for Google.
You're kind of missing the point.
No, people are not going to substitute their 10" tablet screen for their 24 inch desktop monitor and they aren't going to replace their full size keyboard with a touch screen equivalent.
The form factors are sticking around, but the devices will converge. The Motorola Atrix points the way, but it is only half way there. Cell phones are now powerful enough that they can fulfill 99% of daily needs. So a dock - and in the future wireless docking so that the dock itself is redundant - transforms it into a full size solution.
I think the reason most iPhone users struggle to understand the utility of this is that they've been deprived of multitasking for so long that they've actually adapted all their workflows to the assumption that they can only do one thing at a time on their phone.
I use the internet almost reflexively while on the phone. It's almost to the point of being a bad habit. Usually I'm talking over bluetooth so the phone is in front of me and I'm googling every things they say or looking up prices of things they mention or finding movie times or reviews or grabbing their profile from linked in so I can seem that little bit more informed about them (or to put it the other way, a little bit less rudely ignorant of everything I should know about them but blissfully forgot), or checking my calendar or adding appointments to it for things they mention.
I think once people get used to having the ability to multitask on their phones it will slowly come to be seen as an essential feature and network connectivity will be a presumption, so discovering that half the features on their phone are "broken" while their on a call will be a bit of a rude shock eventually.
Even in Aus the writing is on the wall for Nokia. Open up your average catalogue delivered in the mail - these things used to be filled with cheap prepaid Nokia phones. At least half that space is now Android. It makes me cringe a bit because most of the Androids are horrible Huawei crap but there they are, next to the Nokia dumb phones and almost as cheap and getting cheaper by the day, and incomparable in terms of the ecosystem you are getting even if the phone itself is crap.
I have 3 android devices in my home...none of them run the same version, one has google apps natively, one has a hack to get it and the other one I haven't even bothered with because its too much of a pain in the ass.
So what? The point of Android is that it deliberately supports all this variety with an OS design that accommodates it. The fact that you have 3 different versions of the OS which may or may not have custom skins in no way prevents someone from writing an app that targets all three. To the app developer it makes almost no difference what the 'skin' on your phone looks like.
There's an awful lot of FUD / BS / rubbish in the parent post.
Basically, you have tons of different devices you need to support, all with different hardware, resolution and features. They might or might not have changes made by the phone manufacturer and/or telcos. They might have physical keyboards or only touchscreen. Maybe multitouch on some.
None of which matters for any sensible application. Android provides all the tools you need to add resources for different resolutions, or if you don't want to, just ship hi res resources and it scales them for you. The SDK makes it trivial to target any subset of phones with particular features and your app just won't appear for phones that don't have them.
Camera on the back, maybe front too, or not at all?
This is identical to iOS, a platform you seem to think is wonderful.
Different API's supported by different versions of Android.. It's a nightmare.
A nightmare??? The first thing the SDK does when you create a project is ask you what API level you want to target and from that point on all the APIs are set up for you so that anything not supported by your target platforms is a compile error. Far from being a nightmare, it couldn't be more trivial.
it means you have to create and test your applications and games for every device and most likely make some changes and bugfixes to some of them.
Granted, you do usually need to test on real hardware for a variety of phones. But it's hardly what you suggest - having 3 or 4 devices is more than sufficient for an average app and Google's error reporting system gives you complete stack traces from the field so you can quickly track down problems with devices you don't have.
Take for example the popular Angry Birds game - the developers have outright said they just cannot support all the different Android devices.
Here you really jump the shark. The Angry Birds developers explicitly wrote a post about how great it was to develop for Android and the amazing number of devices they were able to ship to with relative ease. The only reason there is a "lite" version coming is because some devices are so old and slow they just can't satisfy performance and memory requirements, but that's simply a factor of being old. Your 1G iPod Touch won't run the high end games in the Apple App Store either.