Not really, I think they were just happy to copy whatever was winning that quarter. The suggestion that Android was a premeditated feature-for-feature counterstrike against the iPhone is false, but it's clear that Android absorbed the post-iPhone reality (let's put it that way, shall we?) a lot faster than RIM, Microsoft, Sony-Ericsson, Nokia, etc. did.
Obviously the Android developers have their own ideas about what should be in a phone, but one of their biggest ones is "match our competitors in features."
What? Choosing to have your wireless enabled, bluetooth enabled, brightness high, etc are not "faults", they're user choices.
I would say that having to switch these off for the sake of power resource management is a fault-- you really shouldn't have to worry about it. Switching it off because you really don't want to use wifi, because the plane's landing or you're in some sort of high-security or EMR-controlled area, is a legit reason.
I dunno how such an app (on a non-jailbroken iPhone) would work, a 3rd party app cannot switch the wifi on and off, that's a plain security hole, because it would allow malware to do denial of service.
talking points that have no basis in any verifiable fact whatsoever and is just regurgitated on tech forums to fuel the fud flames and keep the fanboys happy?
That's why we're here, isn't it?:)
Make a positive argument -- I'm just riffing here, lay out why I'm wrong. Don't complain that my argument is defective thus you're right.
It seems like you can only get an open Android phone by disposing of most of what would make Android appealing and competitive.
I was recently looking for a milspec phone possibly to replace the iPhone. There are a few, but they're Motorola and ship with Eclair, today, which makes me oh-so-curious as to wether they (or Sprint) will get around to updating them. And even better, they aren't GSM and Cyanogenmod doesn't support them. So I can either have a backward phone that might or might not run the future apps I want to run, or I can spend my days in Forum Hell trying to keep the thing up to date.
I really wouldn't be in the market for a Nexus -- if I'm going to get an Android I'd want to get back into using a hardware keyboard, and the Nexus's always seemed flimsier than an iPhone to me. A lot of Android phones don't seem to have the same build quality and as long as so many of them insist on "battery door bragging rights," a battery door I would never use, I guess I'm stuck. After my Treo 650 I never want to see another battery door as long as I live.
And while Google is good at many things, I am not confident of their ability to do good end-user customer service. Very few companies can come close to dropping by one of our shops, of the six in town, where they replace your phone and it restores from an image so perfect the only way you'd know is by looking at the serial number. Somebody should copy that feature, but most vendors don't do that. I do know one that does, though.
do you really think that just when they are starting to feel cool using their new device that they want the rug snatched from underneath them by rebooting their phone into an unfamiliar version of the OS? Of course they don't.
If people don't care about having the latest Android, then it's very questionable if they care very much about having any Android.
I know, isn't it just terrible that there is a great smartphone that normal working people can actually afford? The HORROR!
I think you miss my point -- it's not that they could afford them, it's that they had no preference for them. People are just buying the default and the features and market differentiation of Android is having only marginal effect. Android isn't bought because people want it, it's bought because it's what's on the shelf. Android users could become Windows users next week if Microsoft makes a better deal with Samsung and Verizon than Google makes, Android users aren't sticky. Google's completely dependent upon the carriers and OEMs to distribute their OS, and it's up to them what will run on their phones -- the bulk of the users clearly don't give a damn and will use any old thing as long as it has a touchscreen and plays movies and the web browser doesn't suck (even if they only have a quarter of the mobile web requests useragents compared to iOS's 2/3s).
The success of Android is built upon carriers and OEMs, and not upon the goodwill of its millions of end users. I would say it's a foundation of sand if Microsoft didn't do such a good job with the same business model in the 90s. Of course we all remember happy we were with our computers in that period...
You can sell apps outside the market, the amazon app store is one location. You could even sell them from your own website if you wanted too.
Without the placement on the store you're doomed. No one outside a few enthusiasts will know you exist -- if you're going to sell Android apps, placement in the Market (and the cobranding and Google imprimatur) is obligatory, otherwise you're just some hack selling Palm software on a rack at the Office Depot circa 2001.
Not sure what you mean about me not disposing of your second point, but root is not needed for wired tether.
If you buy a Motorola, how do you delete MOTOBLUR without rooting? If you buy a Verizon phone, how do delete VZ Navigator without rooting?
It's the whole point really. People whine about Apple taking away their freedom and act like Android can polish the OEM's and carrier's shit, when in the end if you want to "do what you want with your own phone" you either have to jailbreak, Android OR iOS, or your options are very limited.
Unable to reproduce this fault on an iPhone, it'll run the day or two and the only time I ever go into the wifi menu is when I specifically don't want it to join things -- so I'm turning it off not to save power, but, ironically, to avoid getting bugged by a bunch of modal, non-Androidy notifications.
No matter what google does you can still install from outside the market. Meaning that wired tether can be done without rooting.
Oh I know, but I doubt more than 10% of Android users ever go anywhere other than the market for apps, and it does sorta ruin the possibility that anybody could ever sell a tethering app for money; and that doesn't dispose of my second point, homeslice.
Some people like devices with slide out keyboards like the Samsung Epic 4G or blackberry-esque business phones like the Droid Pro.
Some people also like to be able to always run the latest OS without jailbreaking or waiting for their carrier modulo their OEM to get their act together.
Sprint and T-Mobile have Android, they don't have iPhones.
I don't have a Discover card either, I dunno how I survive without the added options. T-Mobile still exists?
There are obviously many reasons people choose Android as evidenced by the meteoric rise in market share and it is a bit arrogant for you to presume what people "need to worry about" when it comes to their choice of phone.
Two-for-one deals and "I want a phone that supplements an iPhone and is compatible with my network," is a powerful force. Android somehow has a majority of share and growth among smartphones, yet it does about 1/4 of all the mobile web browsing and something like 1/5th of all the app sales. These are people who don't care what phone they use, because they wanted feature phones and got upsold by marketing into an iPhone they couldn't buy. Android has many features but they don't penetrate most of its market, they're just there to make phones move off the shelf as "good enough" to compete with iPhones.
Don't be TOO smug, Google did pull all of the tethering apps from their market, and if the main feature you want on your new Android phone is "Delete my VZ Navigator," you're SOL without jailbreaking, so you're back where the iPhone people are.
There were Android prototypes predating the iPhone announcement, like the HTC Omni and this rather suggestive keyboard candybar (doesn't look like an iPhone to me). Remember, Android was a company that had been developing their software for years before Google bought it.
Re:Well that didn't take long.
on
iOS 5 Jailbroken
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· Score: 3, Funny
They copied everything but the ads and carrier brown-nosing.
67% of accounts on both Sony and Gawker use the same password.
Without a map of Sony accounts to Gawker accounts I don't know what this means... I take it to mean "The cardinalty of the set that is the union of password sets from Sony and Gawker is 67% of the cardinality of the set of Sony passwords."
I was going to bring up the Downtown LA freeway "vandal" as well, here is the original LA Times story. What's funny is Caltrans recently redid all of the signage on the 110 though downtown, and though they replaced his particular sign, they completely adopted his informational scheme for the 110-four level interchange, to the point that the signs downtown are almost strange in their helpfulness compared to the signs on the 405 on the Westside or around the 101 in the Cahuenga pass.
It's the sort of defacement of public property I can get behind. But it looks like they've also doubled the barbed wire on all of the signs:P
Isn't this why we're supposed to move all these transactions over https? (Except for the NTLM token, you probably shouldn't allow those to fly over the WAN under any circumstance.)
You CAN get Android phones off-contract and you DO get more choice -- Interior, Best Buy-Day: "Gee, will I get the 4G phone with black trim, or the 4G phone with a kickstand?"
And these do account for some of Android's growth, but not perhaps as much as price dumping, and people being steered or defaulted to whatever the phone company is pushing. This is good for Android but it doesn't imply a very deep branding-- nothing's to keep WebOS or Microsoft or RIM from making a better revenue-sharing deal with the Samsungs and Verizons of the world tomorrow, and the end-users, unpreferenced as they are, will just buy whatever. People don't buy open as much as they buy apps, and open isn't the only or even the best way to bring apps.
It's not like the 80s where network effects drive 3rd part devs drives apps drives customer growth, adhering them to the platform by the by. Developer labor is cheap, even small indie houses are able to maintain multiple versions of their apps at little cost, even if the revenues they get from the Android version are a third of the iOS version, and people don't need ISA compatibility from phone to phone like they do with PCs. It's just a different dynamic.
Community-created mods are great but iOS, WebOS, and Android each have community-created mods, and all the OEMs, if not the OS vendors, obstruct them vigorously. Jailbreaking and mods don't distinguish one platform from the other, they're all basically equal, unless you count such wishywashy things as "Google supports us (just not with money, manpower, or anything more than a blog post)."
The openness appeals not so much to the consumers, but to the manufacturers and carriers, who can then offer Android-based products at a wide range of price points.
So if you have a great phone, there's two ways to put it in a million people's hands:
1) Market it and convince a million people that it's a good phone. (OR)
2) Shake hands with a guy at Verizon, agree to their bootloader, co-branding and pre-installed app conditions, and let them collect customers through buy-one-get-one-free promotions and contract subscriber inertia.
I agree with you completely, the second one works better.
To be fair I don't think we've ever seen a contract for Ice Cream Sandwich; the real problem is that the OHA members get months of lead time with the new OSs before they are "opened," which allows them to customize it to their phones and tailor their phones to the new features. Any manufacturer who waits for the "opening" of a new Android is going to be killed in the marketplace. Is Android open? Prove it: go download Ice Cream Sandwich right now. It exists, Motorola and Samsung can see it, why can't you?
Of course people buy the thing for the apps and the services, not the OS. Thus Google can supply an open infrastructure that is completely useless and unmarketable to consumers, unless you license their apps and use their services, which are as closed source as Win32. It's just a rehash of Apple's open Darwin/closed Cocoa strategy.
Android's an open OS, but it's nothing remotely like an open platform, particularly if you're in the business of making phones. Cyanogenmod survives only by virtue of its utter obscurity.
The sort of Open that Android practices is orthogonal to consumer rights, unless you're a modding geek.
Only the AOSP Android is an open platform in any fair sense. The OHA Android, which is to say, the only Android phone vendors are interested in selling, is developed under lock and key and only opened once the OHA members have had enough time to outrun the competition.
IANAL, though Amazon has a business presence in California, so Cali can serve notice to any office in California, and if Amazon doesn't appear, the prosecutor in California move to attach or lien any property Amazon has in California.
If Amazon was just shipping boxes through UPS to California it wouldn't be an issue, but that's not the case. It's not like a Subway in West LA can stop collecting sales tax, and then when the Board of Equalization shows up, claim they're a Delaware corporation and blah blah federalism.
Slashdot Mirror
So much mobile fanboy trollbait on the 'dot this morning.
The post-PATRIOT Act government-controlled-computing trope is quickly approaching Godwin-level hysteria.
Great, so Amazon/Google/Apple can see the source code of my unreleased application? :)
Not really, I think they were just happy to copy whatever was winning that quarter. The suggestion that Android was a premeditated feature-for-feature counterstrike against the iPhone is false, but it's clear that Android absorbed the post-iPhone reality (let's put it that way, shall we?) a lot faster than RIM, Microsoft, Sony-Ericsson, Nokia, etc. did.
Obviously the Android developers have their own ideas about what should be in a phone, but one of their biggest ones is "match our competitors in features."
What? Choosing to have your wireless enabled, bluetooth enabled, brightness high, etc are not "faults", they're user choices.
I would say that having to switch these off for the sake of power resource management is a fault-- you really shouldn't have to worry about it. Switching it off because you really don't want to use wifi, because the plane's landing or you're in some sort of high-security or EMR-controlled area, is a legit reason.
I dunno how such an app (on a non-jailbroken iPhone) would work, a 3rd party app cannot switch the wifi on and off, that's a plain security hole, because it would allow malware to do denial of service.
That's why we're here, isn't it? :)
Make a positive argument -- I'm just riffing here, lay out why I'm wrong. Don't complain that my argument is defective thus you're right.
It seems like you can only get an open Android phone by disposing of most of what would make Android appealing and competitive.
I was recently looking for a milspec phone possibly to replace the iPhone. There are a few, but they're Motorola and ship with Eclair, today, which makes me oh-so-curious as to wether they (or Sprint) will get around to updating them. And even better, they aren't GSM and Cyanogenmod doesn't support them. So I can either have a backward phone that might or might not run the future apps I want to run, or I can spend my days in Forum Hell trying to keep the thing up to date.
I really wouldn't be in the market for a Nexus -- if I'm going to get an Android I'd want to get back into using a hardware keyboard, and the Nexus's always seemed flimsier than an iPhone to me. A lot of Android phones don't seem to have the same build quality and as long as so many of them insist on "battery door bragging rights," a battery door I would never use, I guess I'm stuck. After my Treo 650 I never want to see another battery door as long as I live.
And while Google is good at many things, I am not confident of their ability to do good end-user customer service. Very few companies can come close to dropping by one of our shops, of the six in town, where they replace your phone and it restores from an image so perfect the only way you'd know is by looking at the serial number. Somebody should copy that feature, but most vendors don't do that. I do know one that does, though.
If people don't care about having the latest Android, then it's very questionable if they care very much about having any Android.
I think you miss my point -- it's not that they could afford them, it's that they had no preference for them. People are just buying the default and the features and market differentiation of Android is having only marginal effect. Android isn't bought because people want it, it's bought because it's what's on the shelf. Android users could become Windows users next week if Microsoft makes a better deal with Samsung and Verizon than Google makes, Android users aren't sticky. Google's completely dependent upon the carriers and OEMs to distribute their OS, and it's up to them what will run on their phones -- the bulk of the users clearly don't give a damn and will use any old thing as long as it has a touchscreen and plays movies and the web browser doesn't suck (even if they only have a quarter of the mobile web requests useragents compared to iOS's 2/3s).
The success of Android is built upon carriers and OEMs, and not upon the goodwill of its millions of end users. I would say it's a foundation of sand if Microsoft didn't do such a good job with the same business model in the 90s. Of course we all remember happy we were with our computers in that period...
You can sell apps outside the market, the amazon app store is one location. You could even sell them from your own website if you wanted too.
Without the placement on the store you're doomed. No one outside a few enthusiasts will know you exist -- if you're going to sell Android apps, placement in the Market (and the cobranding and Google imprimatur) is obligatory, otherwise you're just some hack selling Palm software on a rack at the Office Depot circa 2001.
Not sure what you mean about me not disposing of your second point, but root is not needed for wired tether.
If you buy a Motorola, how do you delete MOTOBLUR without rooting? If you buy a Verizon phone, how do delete VZ Navigator without rooting?
It's the whole point really. People whine about Apple taking away their freedom and act like Android can polish the OEM's and carrier's shit, when in the end if you want to "do what you want with your own phone" you either have to jailbreak, Android OR iOS, or your options are very limited.
Unable to reproduce this fault on an iPhone, it'll run the day or two and the only time I ever go into the wifi menu is when I specifically don't want it to join things -- so I'm turning it off not to save power, but, ironically, to avoid getting bugged by a bunch of modal, non-Androidy notifications.
Oh I know, but I doubt more than 10% of Android users ever go anywhere other than the market for apps, and it does sorta ruin the possibility that anybody could ever sell a tethering app for money; and that doesn't dispose of my second point, homeslice.
Some people also like to be able to always run the latest OS without jailbreaking or waiting for their carrier modulo their OEM to get their act together.
I don't have a Discover card either, I dunno how I survive without the added options. T-Mobile still exists?
Two-for-one deals and "I want a phone that supplements an iPhone and is compatible with my network," is a powerful force. Android somehow has a majority of share and growth among smartphones, yet it does about 1/4 of all the mobile web browsing and something like 1/5th of all the app sales. These are people who don't care what phone they use, because they wanted feature phones and got upsold by marketing into an iPhone they couldn't buy. Android has many features but they don't penetrate most of its market, they're just there to make phones move off the shelf as "good enough" to compete with iPhones.
Don't be TOO smug, Google did pull all of the tethering apps from their market, and if the main feature you want on your new Android phone is "Delete my VZ Navigator," you're SOL without jailbreaking, so you're back where the iPhone people are.
There were Android prototypes predating the iPhone announcement, like the HTC Omni and this rather suggestive keyboard candybar (doesn't look like an iPhone to me). Remember, Android was a company that had been developing their software for years before Google bought it.
They copied everything but the ads and carrier brown-nosing.
67% of accounts on both Sony and Gawker use the same password.
Without a map of Sony accounts to Gawker accounts I don't know what this means... I take it to mean "The cardinalty of the set that is the union of password sets from Sony and Gawker is 67% of the cardinality of the set of Sony passwords."
I was going to bring up the Downtown LA freeway "vandal" as well, here is the original LA Times story. What's funny is Caltrans recently redid all of the signage on the 110 though downtown, and though they replaced his particular sign, they completely adopted his informational scheme for the 110-four level interchange, to the point that the signs downtown are almost strange in their helpfulness compared to the signs on the 405 on the Westside or around the 101 in the Cahuenga pass.
It's the sort of defacement of public property I can get behind. But it looks like they've also doubled the barbed wire on all of the signs :P
Isn't this why we're supposed to move all these transactions over https? (Except for the NTLM token, you probably shouldn't allow those to fly over the WAN under any circumstance.)
Notable exception: salt your inputs to hashing algorithms when recording passwords and other data that can be attacked with rainbow tables.
You CAN get Android phones off-contract and you DO get more choice -- Interior, Best Buy-Day: "Gee, will I get the 4G phone with black trim, or the 4G phone with a kickstand?"
And these do account for some of Android's growth, but not perhaps as much as price dumping, and people being steered or defaulted to whatever the phone company is pushing. This is good for Android but it doesn't imply a very deep branding-- nothing's to keep WebOS or Microsoft or RIM from making a better revenue-sharing deal with the Samsungs and Verizons of the world tomorrow, and the end-users, unpreferenced as they are, will just buy whatever. People don't buy open as much as they buy apps, and open isn't the only or even the best way to bring apps.
It's not like the 80s where network effects drive 3rd part devs drives apps drives customer growth, adhering them to the platform by the by. Developer labor is cheap, even small indie houses are able to maintain multiple versions of their apps at little cost, even if the revenues they get from the Android version are a third of the iOS version, and people don't need ISA compatibility from phone to phone like they do with PCs. It's just a different dynamic.
Community-created mods are great but iOS, WebOS, and Android each have community-created mods, and all the OEMs, if not the OS vendors, obstruct them vigorously. Jailbreaking and mods don't distinguish one platform from the other, they're all basically equal, unless you count such wishywashy things as "Google supports us (just not with money, manpower, or anything more than a blog post)."
So if you have a great phone, there's two ways to put it in a million people's hands:
1) Market it and convince a million people that it's a good phone. (OR)
2) Shake hands with a guy at Verizon, agree to their bootloader, co-branding and pre-installed app conditions, and let them collect customers through buy-one-get-one-free promotions and contract subscriber inertia.
I agree with you completely, the second one works better.
To be fair I don't think we've ever seen a contract for Ice Cream Sandwich; the real problem is that the OHA members get months of lead time with the new OSs before they are "opened," which allows them to customize it to their phones and tailor their phones to the new features. Any manufacturer who waits for the "opening" of a new Android is going to be killed in the marketplace. Is Android open? Prove it: go download Ice Cream Sandwich right now. It exists, Motorola and Samsung can see it, why can't you?
Of course people buy the thing for the apps and the services, not the OS. Thus Google can supply an open infrastructure that is completely useless and unmarketable to consumers, unless you license their apps and use their services, which are as closed source as Win32. It's just a rehash of Apple's open Darwin/closed Cocoa strategy.
Android's an open OS, but it's nothing remotely like an open platform, particularly if you're in the business of making phones. Cyanogenmod survives only by virtue of its utter obscurity.
The sort of Open that Android practices is orthogonal to consumer rights, unless you're a modding geek.
Only the AOSP Android is an open platform in any fair sense. The OHA Android, which is to say, the only Android phone vendors are interested in selling, is developed under lock and key and only opened once the OHA members have had enough time to outrun the competition.
Satire is for Onion articles, not open letters to your boss.
IANAL, though Amazon has a business presence in California, so Cali can serve notice to any office in California, and if Amazon doesn't appear, the prosecutor in California move to attach or lien any property Amazon has in California.
If Amazon was just shipping boxes through UPS to California it wouldn't be an issue, but that's not the case. It's not like a Subway in West LA can stop collecting sales tax, and then when the Board of Equalization shows up, claim they're a Delaware corporation and blah blah federalism.