And how many new versions of iOS will that "new" 3GS be getting going into the future?
No idea. But clearly Apple has been phenomenally better than Android in delivering updates to phones. As long as new versions on iOS work within the memory and speed constraints of the 3GS, they'll get software updates.
But again, you are trying to do a one to one comparison of Android, a commodity OS on a commodity platform to Apple.
Yeah, I'm judging them in the same way. Not giving Android an easy ride because it can't keep up.
The only half-way valid comparison you can make is the iPhone to Google Nexus series and those phones get updates in just as timely a fashion as iPhones.
But they don't. Apple phones get an update the very same day as a phone with a new version comes out. The very same day. No Android phones do. The Galaxy Nexus came out a month ago - the previous Nexus - the Nexus S - only got Ice Cream Sandwich yesterday. A month late. And that's your very best case scenario for Android.
Explain the absence? What?! What job do you do? Do you do it for free, or do you expect a salary? What is it with this expecting something for nothing mentality?
Not only expecting the product of someone else's work to be yours for free but expecting an explanation when it's not!
99c. How much does a cup of coffee cost?
Here's a bit of enlightenment: Try being less of a leech with a sense of entitlement, and more of a human being.
iPhone is a premium product which ignores the low-end market
Maybe once. Now you can get an iPhone 3GS for free with a contract.
My Epic 4G (GalaxyS) shipped with Eclair and has since been updated to Froyo and now Gingerbread.
The same day new phones shipped with those OS versions, or some months later? Android 4.0 - Ice Cream Sandwich - is shipping on new phones now. Have you got it yet, or are you still on 2.3?
As you know the 3GS is the minimum spec for iOS5. The 3G has half the memory and half the speed of the 3GS. The only reason it doesn't get iOS 5 updates is because it's not capable of running them. It's a 3 and a half year old phone.
That differs from Android, in that phones that are only a few months old don't get Android updates - certainly not promptly, and often not at all.
You can't sell DOS to a market where Linux is free, or Office 95 to a market that has free office products that cover most of the basic functionality.
What's with the references to DOS and historical versions of Office? Windows vastly more popular than Linux. And MS Office is more popular than any free office suite. It was true a decade ago, it's just as true today.
I don't mind ads at all. Good TV cost money, and ads pay for it.
The best TV we have in Britain is the BBC, and it's entirely free of ads. It's funded by people paying for a "TV License" which costs 145,50 GBP (About $225) per year. Some people complain about having to pay, but most people appreciate the higher standards of the BBC, and the lack of adverts, and support the license fee concept.
They generally won't pay when there is a free alternative. Apple tend to want to hide free apps these days.
There's no justification for that statement. The App Store makes Free apps just as visible as paid ones.
If I was going to totally through ethics out the window for the pursuit of profit as an "App" developer
Yeah right. Working to make a living is evil. Creating something and then expecting people that want to use it to pay for it is unethical.
Just one question: Who's money are you living on whilst you do all this coding?
Don't get me wrong, plenty of things in the capitalist system is objectionable to me. But there seems something very honest about all these indie developers creating apps and selling on an app store for a dollar or so a time, in the hope of making enough to support themselves and their families.
The definition of a "well-designed app" is not a cross platform app. In fact more often than not, with the exception of games, cross platform apps are poorly designed, particularly if you're only talking 1% or "a few lines" difference on different platforms. Different platforms have different UI standards, and different resources. Lowest common denominator cross-platform apps such as you are describing are poor designs on every platform.
I don't doubt that there are plenty of "hardcore" iPhone users that view their phone as a tool rather than a toy. Were you looking for some point of differentiation there?
How about if he said Phones are still shipping with and 18 month old version of Android? And yet there have been numerous Android phone OS releases since then.
First point - don't trust retailer "bestseller" lists. I used to work for a book distributer, and the company used to print up "bestseller" before the books on them were even published.
I've also used one of the mainstream off the shelf eCommerce systems. It allows you to calculate bestseller lists from actual sales, but also gives the facility to insert any other products into the list too.
Bestseller lists are marketing tools, not reliable sources of information for the public.
Second point: Even if those are the best selling US and Europe models, doesn't mean that most Android phones sold are from that top end. There are hundreds of small manufacturers shovelling out cheap crap. And they are being sold all around the world. Together they outnumber the flagship devices.
You need to listen harder. Amazon say they are moving more than a million Kindle units per week. But they are including the classic ebook kindles in that figure. They are not breaking out the Kindle Fire sales as a separate item.
No one was in any doubt that the old style B&W ebook Kindles at less than $100 would sell well in the weeks before Christmas. Kindle FIre is a different story. Sales appear to be disappointing, and returns high.
Most of the Android APIs are derivatives of the very well tested, designed, and readable UNIX glibc APIs that have been in production for over twenty years. The Free Software Foundation adds new APIs with every release, yet they still follow the design patterns and methodologies of the older application interfaces, making learning new ones quite easy.
Well that's rather strange, given that glibc is procedural C, and the standard Android API is an Object-oriented Java variant. You might have glibc available when you punch through into native mode for non App UI stuff. But the Android API based on glibc? Nonsense.
(You can of course also go down to the level of POSIX and C apis on iOS. But virtually no one would want or need to unless they were doing something cross-platform. Maybe Android devs have more need of lower level APIs if the standard API isn't so good.)
Whenever there's a survey report, the first two questions to ask are: Who did they ask? and What was the exact question?
Te people they asked were members of IBM developerWorks.
"developerWorks is a free web-based professional network and technical resource center from IBM for software developers, IT professionals, and students worldwide. The site attracts 4 million unique visitors per month in 195 countries[1], and is designed to help users develop and master skills, solve problems, collaborate with peers, and stay ahead of the latest trends in open standards."
The first listed OS amongst IBM developerWorks members is Linux.
And so the most popular answer for mobile development platform from these people was Android. Amazing. Hold the presses.
It's not just that most of their developers use iOS. It's that of the applications using Flurry that are on both iOS and Android, the developers are making 4 times as much on iOS.
And, I'm sorry, but if you believe that the number of Windows or Apple developers, whilst both being very large in number, comes *ANYWHERE CLOSE* to the number of people who have been developing free software for essentially 30 years now when UNIX first came on the scene, then you need your head tested.
It's a shame that after all that time and work, free software is usually so poor then.
They're not a waste of time. They give a user a sense of structure in an app. For example in a drill down app, master lists are on the left, detail is on the right, just as they might be on a PC screen. But as a phone screen is too small to display both at once, animated transitions give that sense, whilst only displaying a part of the full picture.
What you say is basically right, but your timing s a bit off. Here's the video showing what you say, but it dates from 10 months after the iPhone was announced. The primitive state of the touch version suggests development of that started after the iPhone announcement.
** Troll alert ** When i see the phrase "Android was first conceived as a Blackberry competitor" I can almost guarantee that Bonch is the poster.
He's not a troll given that he is right. Android was designed as a Blackberry copy originally, then when iPhone came out, they had to do some rapid changes of plans to make it look more iPhone like.
Below is a video from Google of early Android. It dates from about 10 months after the iPhone was announced, 4 months after iPhone shipped. It clearly shows from about 1:30 a polished UI which is copying the Blackberry platform. Then from about 3:00 a rudimentary iPhone copy. You can tell that it's early work: they've implemented some touch control so that they can show off Google Maps and dragging in the browser. But in between those he has to use the keyboard cursor pad to navigate the UI.
Note the attempt at deception of focussing in on the screen only so that the keyboard is out of shot.
Android was not designed for multiple form factors. It was designed as a Blackberry copy. Then it was changed so that it could also do an iPhone copy. The iPhone copy variant quickly became the main one.
It needed to work on cheap phones without GPU acceleration to increase market penetration and to provide a solution to the low-end of the market as well as the high end.
That's a bullshit retro-justification. Android didn't have GPU acceleration till recently because it was originally envisaged as a Blackberry copy, and Blackberry didn't have advanced graphics. It's only when iPhone came out that any need was seen for using a GPU in a phone, beyond gaming.
But I'm still waiting on your explanation on why a 100% identical app costs something in the iTunes store which is free on the Android store.
But they're not 100% identical. You've already pointed out that one is adware and the other is not. There's at least that difference. And generally speaking there are other differences too.
Slashdot Mirror
And how many new versions of iOS will that "new" 3GS be getting going into the future?
No idea. But clearly Apple has been phenomenally better than Android in delivering updates to phones. As long as new versions on iOS work within the memory and speed constraints of the 3GS, they'll get software updates.
But again, you are trying to do a one to one comparison of Android, a commodity OS on a commodity platform to Apple.
Yeah, I'm judging them in the same way. Not giving Android an easy ride because it can't keep up.
The only half-way valid comparison you can make is the iPhone to Google Nexus series and those phones get updates in just as timely a fashion as iPhones.
But they don't. Apple phones get an update the very same day as a phone with a new version comes out. The very same day. No Android phones do. The Galaxy Nexus came out a month ago - the previous Nexus - the Nexus S - only got Ice Cream Sandwich yesterday. A month late. And that's your very best case scenario for Android.
Explain the absence? What?! What job do you do? Do you do it for free, or do you expect a salary? What is it with this expecting something for nothing mentality?
Not only expecting the product of someone else's work to be yours for free but expecting an explanation when it's not!
99c. How much does a cup of coffee cost?
Here's a bit of enlightenment: Try being less of a leech with a sense of entitlement, and more of a human being.
iPhone is a premium product which ignores the low-end market
Maybe once. Now you can get an iPhone 3GS for free with a contract.
My Epic 4G (GalaxyS) shipped with Eclair and has since been updated to Froyo and now Gingerbread.
The same day new phones shipped with those OS versions, or some months later? Android 4.0 - Ice Cream Sandwich - is shipping on new phones now. Have you got it yet, or are you still on 2.3?
The reason you don't like them is because the transitions on Android are random and fucking awful. Done properly they add to a UI.
The solution is to start freeing cell phones from restrictions, so that people can upgrade the OS themselves.
Spot the geek. Suggest a solution that isn't a suitable solution for 99.9% of the population.
A real solution promptly offers to upgrade a phone's software when a new version comes out. Rather like iOS.
As you know the 3GS is the minimum spec for iOS5. The 3G has half the memory and half the speed of the 3GS. The only reason it doesn't get iOS 5 updates is because it's not capable of running them. It's a 3 and a half year old phone.
That differs from Android, in that phones that are only a few months old don't get Android updates - certainly not promptly, and often not at all.
They have to line up you say? Wow, you must be a real expert.
You can't sell DOS to a market where Linux is free, or Office 95 to a market that has free office products that cover most of the basic functionality.
What's with the references to DOS and historical versions of Office? Windows vastly more popular than Linux. And MS Office is more popular than any free office suite. It was true a decade ago, it's just as true today.
And that seems to destroy your argument.
I don't mind ads at all. Good TV cost money, and ads pay for it.
The best TV we have in Britain is the BBC, and it's entirely free of ads. It's funded by people paying for a "TV License" which costs 145,50 GBP (About $225) per year. Some people complain about having to pay, but most people appreciate the higher standards of the BBC, and the lack of adverts, and support the license fee concept.
They generally won't pay when there is a free alternative. Apple tend to want to hide free apps these days.
There's no justification for that statement. The App Store makes Free apps just as visible as paid ones.
If I was going to totally through ethics out the window for the pursuit of profit as an "App" developer
Yeah right. Working to make a living is evil. Creating something and then expecting people that want to use it to pay for it is unethical.
Just one question: Who's money are you living on whilst you do all this coding?
Don't get me wrong, plenty of things in the capitalist system is objectionable to me. But there seems something very honest about all these indie developers creating apps and selling on an app store for a dollar or so a time, in the hope of making enough to support themselves and their families.
The definition of a "well-designed app" is not a cross platform app. In fact more often than not, with the exception of games, cross platform apps are poorly designed, particularly if you're only talking 1% or "a few lines" difference on different platforms. Different platforms have different UI standards, and different resources. Lowest common denominator cross-platform apps such as you are describing are poor designs on every platform.
I don't doubt that there are plenty of "hardcore" iPhone users that view their phone as a tool rather than a toy. Were you looking for some point of differentiation there?
My understanding is that there have been about 15 billion download under iOS and 10 billion under Android.
Apple announced passing the 20 billion downloads mark a couple of days ago.
How about if he said Phones are still shipping with and 18 month old version of Android? And yet there have been numerous Android phone OS releases since then.
There is no way of defending it.
First point - don't trust retailer "bestseller" lists. I used to work for a book distributer, and the company used to print up "bestseller" before the books on them were even published.
I've also used one of the mainstream off the shelf eCommerce systems. It allows you to calculate bestseller lists from actual sales, but also gives the facility to insert any other products into the list too.
Bestseller lists are marketing tools, not reliable sources of information for the public.
Second point: Even if those are the best selling US and Europe models, doesn't mean that most Android phones sold are from that top end. There are hundreds of small manufacturers shovelling out cheap crap. And they are being sold all around the world. Together they outnumber the flagship devices.
You can't occupy 'high end' and 'numerically dominant' niches at the same time...
Apple occupies the "change the world" and "make the most money" niches at the same time.
You need to listen harder. Amazon say they are moving more than a million Kindle units per week. But they are including the classic ebook kindles in that figure. They are not breaking out the Kindle Fire sales as a separate item.
http://tabtimes.com/news/ittech-os-android/2011/12/15/amazon-kindle-fire-sales-surging
No one was in any doubt that the old style B&W ebook Kindles at less than $100 would sell well in the weeks before Christmas. Kindle FIre is a different story. Sales appear to be disappointing, and returns high.
Most of the Android APIs are derivatives of the very well tested, designed, and readable UNIX glibc APIs that have been in production for over twenty years. The Free Software Foundation adds new APIs with every release, yet they still follow the design patterns and methodologies of the older application interfaces, making learning new ones quite easy.
Well that's rather strange, given that glibc is procedural C, and the standard Android API is an Object-oriented Java variant. You might have glibc available when you punch through into native mode for non App UI stuff. But the Android API based on glibc? Nonsense.
(You can of course also go down to the level of POSIX and C apis on iOS. But virtually no one would want or need to unless they were doing something cross-platform. Maybe Android devs have more need of lower level APIs if the standard API isn't so good.)
Whenever there's a survey report, the first two questions to ask are: Who did they ask? and What was the exact question?
Te people they asked were members of IBM developerWorks.
"developerWorks is a free web-based professional network and technical resource center from IBM for software developers, IT professionals, and students worldwide. The site attracts 4 million unique visitors per month in 195 countries[1], and is designed to help users develop and master skills, solve problems, collaborate with peers, and stay ahead of the latest trends in open standards."
The first listed OS amongst IBM developerWorks members is Linux.
And so the most popular answer for mobile development platform from these people was Android. Amazing. Hold the presses.
It's not just that most of their developers use iOS. It's that of the applications using Flurry that are on both iOS and Android, the developers are making 4 times as much on iOS.
And, I'm sorry, but if you believe that the number of Windows or Apple developers, whilst both being very large in number, comes *ANYWHERE CLOSE* to the number of people who have been developing free software for essentially 30 years now when UNIX first came on the scene, then you need your head tested.
It's a shame that after all that time and work, free software is usually so poor then.
They're not a waste of time. They give a user a sense of structure in an app. For example in a drill down app, master lists are on the left, detail is on the right, just as they might be on a PC screen. But as a phone screen is too small to display both at once, animated transitions give that sense, whilst only displaying a part of the full picture.
What you say is basically right, but your timing s a bit off. Here's the video showing what you say, but it dates from 10 months after the iPhone was announced. The primitive state of the touch version suggests development of that started after the iPhone announcement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1FJHYqE0RDg#!
** Troll alert ** When i see the phrase "Android was first conceived as a Blackberry competitor" I can almost guarantee that Bonch is the poster.
He's not a troll given that he is right. Android was designed as a Blackberry copy originally, then when iPhone came out, they had to do some rapid changes of plans to make it look more iPhone like.
Below is a video from Google of early Android. It dates from about 10 months after the iPhone was announced, 4 months after iPhone shipped. It clearly shows from about 1:30 a polished UI which is copying the Blackberry platform. Then from about 3:00 a rudimentary iPhone copy. You can tell that it's early work: they've implemented some touch control so that they can show off Google Maps and dragging in the browser. But in between those he has to use the keyboard cursor pad to navigate the UI.
Note the attempt at deception of focussing in on the screen only so that the keyboard is out of shot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1FJHYqE0RDg#!
Android was not designed for multiple form factors. It was designed as a Blackberry copy. Then it was changed so that it could also do an iPhone copy. The iPhone copy variant quickly became the main one.
It needed to work on cheap phones without GPU acceleration to increase market penetration and to provide a solution to the low-end of the market as well as the high end.
That's a bullshit retro-justification. Android didn't have GPU acceleration till recently because it was originally envisaged as a Blackberry copy, and Blackberry didn't have advanced graphics. It's only when iPhone came out that any need was seen for using a GPU in a phone, beyond gaming.
But I'm still waiting on your explanation on why a 100% identical app costs something in the iTunes store which is free on the Android store.
But they're not 100% identical. You've already pointed out that one is adware and the other is not. There's at least that difference. And generally speaking there are other differences too.