Unless one is in an early stage startup and needs the Android revenue to afford the $1250 startup cost for iOS development ($650 Mac mini, $500 iPad, $100 certificate).
Typical experienced iOS developer freelance rates are somewhere around 80-120USD/hr. If you're capable of developing the app yourself, you're talking about less than what you'd earn in two days (and you'd already have the equipment anyway). If you aren't capable of developing the app yourself, that $1250 is a drop in the ocean compared with what you're going to have to pay to get the app developed. Either way, $1250 is inconsequential - that kind of money is a problem for hobbyists, not startups. If a startup can't afford $1250, they can't afford the iOS developer either.
Yes, I'm an app developer and quite a few of the apps I've built have had to go through the approval process, and it can be extremely inconsistent and frustrating.
There have been times when Apple have rejected an app with what is for all intents and purposes zero feedback. There have been times when the only person I have communicated with has admitted that they haven't actually used the app. There have been times when they have rejected an app for things that aren't in their rules. They have been times when they have rejected an app for doing things in a certain (sensible, not against the rules) way, and have refused to tell me if the alternative approach we were considering was acceptable to them or not. There have been times when they have rejected an app for something that is present in a great deal of other apps. There have been times when I've been pretty sure that for whatever reason, the reviewer has psychological issues and decided he hates us. And there have been times when they have reviewed and approved an app almost straight away.
Apple's biggest problem is not so much the inconsistency as the terrible communication. When dealing with things at their scale, there's bound to be fuckups. If something gets rejected, I can't simply drop somebody an email saying "Er, I think you've made a mistake here", or "If that's no good, how about this?" I've got to go through an appeals process, and I've got to type up the appeal in a shitty web form coded by somebody who's halfway through reading Web Development for Dummies. And at the end of it, it's quite likely that I'll still get no useful information.
Probably 80% of people who want to get involved in mobile either don't know how to code an app or don't know an app developer
There's two main problems with this. Firstly, a lot of app developers write shitty code. I've worked on some projects that I've inherited from fairly large, well-known app developers, and even they are pretty terrible. Secondly, these people buying the apps won't be able to make substantial changes because they can't code. So where does that leave them? Putting a new lick of paint on, doing some promo work, then trying to resell? There's not going to be much money in that.
The comparison with real estate is not apt. The people who buy houses, develop them, then sell them on have two things working in their favour. Firstly, they know how to actually improve a house. As the summary indicates, the people targeted by these app trading sites aren't in this position. Secondly, the demand for real estate is growing, yet supply remains the same. You can buy real estate, hang onto it for years, then sell at a profit without doing anything. That is not true of the app market. Every day there's more and more competition with apps. If you buy an app, hang onto it and don't do anything to develop it further, it will lose more and more value and eventually be worthless.
If I were to liken the app trading market to anything, it would be sites like Flippa. These are overwhelmingly made up of auto-generated sites populated by crap to sell onto shady SEO guys - just about the lowest value there is. Good luck applying that to a market where the barrier to entry is a review process that is notoriously finicky about quality.
Some of the most profitable smartphones in the industry have a non-removable battery and no microSD expansion slot.
Name one that isn't made by Apple.
Why? Each revision of the iPhone proves that the lack of removable batteries and microSD slots are not deal breakers that will make a phone fail. The fact that they are made by Apple doesn't change this.
Every Android phone I've ever seen that shipped with the fatal combo of "nonremovable battery and without microSD" basically sucked. The batteries were too small, and the lack of microSD just kicked it over the edge.
And that's precisely my point. If HTC are failing, it's because they are producing phones that suck, not because those two features are necessary for the public to want those phones.
Here's a good reason to demand microSD: you CAN get your phone into a state where it's sufficiently damaged to make mounting it as a USB drive impossible, or into a bootloop where only a full factory wipe (including internal/sdcard) will get it out. When that happens, your data is gone.
I've just switched from Android to iPhone. With Android, a) most of my data was in the cloud anyway (mail on Gmail, auto-upload photos to Google+, etc.) and b) there were numerous backup apps to choose from. With iPhone, my data is backed up to iCloud. If anything happens to my phone, I can set up a new one and restore it from my iCloud backup and it will be like nothing ever happened. Before iCloud, the same backup happened when you synced with iTunes.
Maybe HTC should stop making stupid design decisions like a non removable battery and no microSD expansion slot?
Some of the most profitable smartphones in the industry have a non-removable battery and no microSD expansion slot. I don't think many people care about these features outside of Slashdot.
Owned original HTC Desire and still love it, despite browsing Slashdot on it was soo slow.
I had a Desire Z and it was incredibly buggy and slow. Things like taking more than 30 seconds to send a text message, bugs where all of your text messages got deleted, and taking more than 10 seconds for pulling down the notification panel to have any visible effect. These are things that the average person cares about.
I don't see how a tutorial site can be considered user-friendly if it teaches incorrect things and bad practices. That's pretty damn hostile to beginners, even if it's sugar-coated enough to make it not immediately apparent. I and many others complained loudly and tried many times over the course of years to correct their glaring mistakes and things like code that would only work in Internet Explorer and it all fell on deaf ears. They aren't making a good faith effort in teaching people, the tutorials are just a marketing vehicle for their worthless certs. This is abusive and predatory to beginners and they should not be recommended by anybody.
He's the Linux kernel developer. If I'd have asked what frustrates him most about Linux, he would assume I was talking about the kernel. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using the term "GNU/Linux" to disambiguate.
However the issue isnt that Apple is honoring the warranty
Just the other week I brought in some Apple equipment that had a slight hardware fault (charging problems) that was over a year old but under two years old, and they told me they'd charge for it to be fixed. I'd forgotten about the two year EU warranty (it used to be a year, IIRC). The defect wasn't apparent for the first year or so, but there's no visible damage and I haven't knocked it around at all. Anybody know where I stand?
apple is not going to let me open the direction in the google maps app with one tap
That's pretty much exactly how they handled the changeover of the YouTube app - the app is no longer built-in, but if it's installed, Apple's apps will still open things in the YouTube app.
That's a ridiculous thing to say. Just because Microsoft locked up the low-end market it doesn't follow that Microsoft were necessary for the low-end market to exist. In fact the opposite is true - there were other low-end competitors that were made artificially more expensive by Microsoft due to their abusive relationships with OEMs (whereby the OEMs had to pay Microsoft even for computers that had competing operating systems installed).
why the fuck can't an app that ran fine on iOS 5 also run fine on iOS 6?
They can. Apple do actually put a lot of effort into forwards compatibility, this is the reason behind some of the much maligned App Store rules.
The factor you are missing is that Maps is not a normal third-party app. It's an app that is distributed as part of iOS. Apple had a five year license from Google to do so. That five years is up, and Apple no longer have a license to distribute this app. There's no technical incompatibility, it's a legal issue.
The big flaw in this argument is that he could just as easily have spent his money on exclusive cars, bling, hookers, and donations to moronic lobby groups.
If you think that's a flaw in this argument, I suspect you misunderstood it. The fact that he spent the money on charity when he didn't have to does not erase the harm he did to obtain that money. No matter what he spends the money on, it's a net loss to society.
Has he done more evil than good? Personally I prefer not do get into karma bookkeeping; I think it is pretty arrogant to do so
The iPhone 3GS was still being manufactured until just over a week ago, so there should still be some in stores. If you buy one now, what do you think the chances are of seeing another update again ever?
Very likely. Apple will probably drop support for the 3GS with iOS 7, which will probably be released this time next year. But until then, there are likely to be multiple updates - Apple don't typically jump from version n.0 to version n+1.0.
I don't think its the exception, but the new business model for Apple. Look at all the "new" maps features in iOS6 which are exclusive to the latest, or one generation earlier iDevices.
Why the scare quotes around "new"? The features that require recent hardware - turn-by-turn and flyover - are new.
The Android process is OTA, same as iOS - and, unlike iOS, it has been that way since forever.
That's a best case scenario. My most recent Android phone (Sony Xperia Pro) started out with OTA updates, then regressed so that you could only upgrade with dedicated PC-only software. They've now released a Mac version, but it's still not OTA. It's also taking them months to roll out last year's version of Android - the latest version available is 2.3, released in 2010, and they are struggling to release 4.0, released in 2011.
That is a piddly amount of money compared to what Gates made while stifling innovation through unfair business practices
In case anybody thinks that this is a case of sour grapes and that the charity is the important bit, you can think of this as a variation on the broken window fallacy. Sure, Gates is donating to charity, but to obtain the money to do so, he used business practices which set the industry back several years. Overall, it's a net loss to society.
The reasons why you might want to use this make no sense whatsoever until you realise that they started with something they wanted to build and then tried to think of reasons why people might want it afterwards. It's a solution in search of a problem. They couldn't find any problems it's suited for, so they've resorted to gobbledegook for marketing.
Anybody remember OS/2 and how Windows compatibility killed the native OS/2 application market because it was so good? They can use the same mechanism here: "Always choose OpenStack. Where VMWare is the best solution, you can arrive at that solution through OpenStack. Going directly with VMWare limits your options if it turns out it's not the best solution".
I've used Android since the first Android phone was released in 2008. Each time, I've waited for reviews before buying. Each time the reviews were good. Each time I was sorely disappointed. It took me a while to realise that reviews for Android phones have an implied "...for Android" at the end of each positive statement. "Snappy, responsive UI [for Android]". "Stable and bug-free [for Android]". "[Manufacturer] has promised frequent updates [for Android]".
Meanwhile, aside from a hardware fault with my first iPad (which was replaced on the spot on launch day, when stock was impossible to come by), I've been more than satisfied with the dozen or so Apple products I've bought in the same timeframe. I've pre-ordered an iPhone 5. Sure, I've never seen one in person, but I've got a very good idea of exactly what it's going to be like, and Apple, unlike the competition, have a track record of delivering.
I have no idea how such a dumb bug came about, but people have been complaining about it since May, when they first tried to roll out the update.
I've been keeping a close eye on that list. The unlocked version of the Xperia Pro sold in Europe has an SI of 1249-8527. That list goes up to 1249-8526 then skips ahead to 1250-1741. It's been that way for months. They specifically state in bold that they won't answer questions about when SI numbers will be added to the list ("added to the list" being a euphemism for getting the update). Until last week, the dates were completely different on the list - they showed that updates started in May, then stopped entirely at the end of June. Then people who hadn't received the update started demanding to know why the updates had stopped months ago, and the dates on the list all suddenly changed to August.
I don't know what's going on inside Sony, but there's quite clearly something very fucked up that they aren't talking about.
Andy Rubin, who runs Android development at Google, said Aliyun was a non-compatible version of Android, which weakens the ecosystem. He pointed out that the Open Handset Alliance provides all the tools necessary to make it compatible.
No, what weakens the ecosystem are the Open Handset Alliance members who promise to keep their phones up to date, then renege.
I bought an Xperia Pro in 2011 because Sony announced they'd be getting Android 4. It's currently running Android 2.3, released in 2010, because Sony have completely cocked up the rollout. The rollout started back in May, then mysteriously stopped. It might have something to do with it being so buggy it's unusable (hardcoded to AZERTY keyboards, even if you've got a QWERTY keyboard), but we have no way of knowing because Sony won't talk. They announced it was being rolled out a second time at the beginning of August, but there's no evidence of that in their shitty update software. Customer support stonewall, just saying that the rollout is ongoing. This isn't even for the latest version of Android, it's for last year's version.
This is what's damaging the ecosystem. iOS developers can happily target iOS 5+, released a year ago, and get the vast majority of users (more than 80%). If you targeted the year old Android 4+, you'd only be getting about 22% of users.
REALLY? Last I checked, mobile browsers "rely on the network" and they have NO special code to deal with when the net is down.
You're an idiot. I just can't tell if you're being an idiot on purpose or if you just can't help it.
In case you really are that bindingly ignorant of both mobile browsers and common sense, yes, mobile browsers do include code to handle connectivity issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Typical experienced iOS developer freelance rates are somewhere around 80-120USD/hr. If you're capable of developing the app yourself, you're talking about less than what you'd earn in two days (and you'd already have the equipment anyway). If you aren't capable of developing the app yourself, that $1250 is a drop in the ocean compared with what you're going to have to pay to get the app developed. Either way, $1250 is inconsequential - that kind of money is a problem for hobbyists, not startups. If a startup can't afford $1250, they can't afford the iOS developer either.
Yes, I'm an app developer and quite a few of the apps I've built have had to go through the approval process, and it can be extremely inconsistent and frustrating.
There have been times when Apple have rejected an app with what is for all intents and purposes zero feedback. There have been times when the only person I have communicated with has admitted that they haven't actually used the app. There have been times when they have rejected an app for things that aren't in their rules. They have been times when they have rejected an app for doing things in a certain (sensible, not against the rules) way, and have refused to tell me if the alternative approach we were considering was acceptable to them or not. There have been times when they have rejected an app for something that is present in a great deal of other apps. There have been times when I've been pretty sure that for whatever reason, the reviewer has psychological issues and decided he hates us. And there have been times when they have reviewed and approved an app almost straight away.
Apple's biggest problem is not so much the inconsistency as the terrible communication. When dealing with things at their scale, there's bound to be fuckups. If something gets rejected, I can't simply drop somebody an email saying "Er, I think you've made a mistake here", or "If that's no good, how about this?" I've got to go through an appeals process, and I've got to type up the appeal in a shitty web form coded by somebody who's halfway through reading Web Development for Dummies. And at the end of it, it's quite likely that I'll still get no useful information.
There's two main problems with this. Firstly, a lot of app developers write shitty code. I've worked on some projects that I've inherited from fairly large, well-known app developers, and even they are pretty terrible. Secondly, these people buying the apps won't be able to make substantial changes because they can't code. So where does that leave them? Putting a new lick of paint on, doing some promo work, then trying to resell? There's not going to be much money in that.
The comparison with real estate is not apt. The people who buy houses, develop them, then sell them on have two things working in their favour. Firstly, they know how to actually improve a house. As the summary indicates, the people targeted by these app trading sites aren't in this position. Secondly, the demand for real estate is growing, yet supply remains the same. You can buy real estate, hang onto it for years, then sell at a profit without doing anything. That is not true of the app market. Every day there's more and more competition with apps. If you buy an app, hang onto it and don't do anything to develop it further, it will lose more and more value and eventually be worthless.
If I were to liken the app trading market to anything, it would be sites like Flippa. These are overwhelmingly made up of auto-generated sites populated by crap to sell onto shady SEO guys - just about the lowest value there is. Good luck applying that to a market where the barrier to entry is a review process that is notoriously finicky about quality.
Why? Each revision of the iPhone proves that the lack of removable batteries and microSD slots are not deal breakers that will make a phone fail. The fact that they are made by Apple doesn't change this.
And that's precisely my point. If HTC are failing, it's because they are producing phones that suck, not because those two features are necessary for the public to want those phones.
I've just switched from Android to iPhone. With Android, a) most of my data was in the cloud anyway (mail on Gmail, auto-upload photos to Google+, etc.) and b) there were numerous backup apps to choose from. With iPhone, my data is backed up to iCloud. If anything happens to my phone, I can set up a new one and restore it from my iCloud backup and it will be like nothing ever happened. Before iCloud, the same backup happened when you synced with iTunes.
Some of the most profitable smartphones in the industry have a non-removable battery and no microSD expansion slot. I don't think many people care about these features outside of Slashdot.
I had a Desire Z and it was incredibly buggy and slow. Things like taking more than 30 seconds to send a text message, bugs where all of your text messages got deleted, and taking more than 10 seconds for pulling down the notification panel to have any visible effect. These are things that the average person cares about.
I don't see how a tutorial site can be considered user-friendly if it teaches incorrect things and bad practices. That's pretty damn hostile to beginners, even if it's sugar-coated enough to make it not immediately apparent. I and many others complained loudly and tried many times over the course of years to correct their glaring mistakes and things like code that would only work in Internet Explorer and it all fell on deaf ears. They aren't making a good faith effort in teaching people, the tutorials are just a marketing vehicle for their worthless certs. This is abusive and predatory to beginners and they should not be recommended by anybody.
He's the Linux kernel developer. If I'd have asked what frustrates him most about Linux, he would assume I was talking about the kernel. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using the term "GNU/Linux" to disambiguate.
What frustrates you most in the GNU/Linux ecosystem?
Just the other week I brought in some Apple equipment that had a slight hardware fault (charging problems) that was over a year old but under two years old, and they told me they'd charge for it to be fixed. I'd forgotten about the two year EU warranty (it used to be a year, IIRC). The defect wasn't apparent for the first year or so, but there's no visible damage and I haven't knocked it around at all. Anybody know where I stand?
That's pretty much exactly how they handled the changeover of the YouTube app - the app is no longer built-in, but if it's installed, Apple's apps will still open things in the YouTube app.
That's a ridiculous thing to say. Just because Microsoft locked up the low-end market it doesn't follow that Microsoft were necessary for the low-end market to exist. In fact the opposite is true - there were other low-end competitors that were made artificially more expensive by Microsoft due to their abusive relationships with OEMs (whereby the OEMs had to pay Microsoft even for computers that had competing operating systems installed).
They can. Apple do actually put a lot of effort into forwards compatibility, this is the reason behind some of the much maligned App Store rules.
The factor you are missing is that Maps is not a normal third-party app. It's an app that is distributed as part of iOS. Apple had a five year license from Google to do so. That five years is up, and Apple no longer have a license to distribute this app. There's no technical incompatibility, it's a legal issue.
That doesn't mean they aren't new features.
If you think that's a flaw in this argument, I suspect you misunderstood it. The fact that he spent the money on charity when he didn't have to does not erase the harm he did to obtain that money. No matter what he spends the money on, it's a net loss to society.
That is not what I am doing.
Very likely. Apple will probably drop support for the 3GS with iOS 7, which will probably be released this time next year. But until then, there are likely to be multiple updates - Apple don't typically jump from version n.0 to version n+1.0.
Why the scare quotes around "new"? The features that require recent hardware - turn-by-turn and flyover - are new.
That's a best case scenario. My most recent Android phone (Sony Xperia Pro) started out with OTA updates, then regressed so that you could only upgrade with dedicated PC-only software. They've now released a Mac version, but it's still not OTA. It's also taking them months to roll out last year's version of Android - the latest version available is 2.3, released in 2010, and they are struggling to release 4.0, released in 2011.
In case anybody thinks that this is a case of sour grapes and that the charity is the important bit, you can think of this as a variation on the broken window fallacy. Sure, Gates is donating to charity, but to obtain the money to do so, he used business practices which set the industry back several years. Overall, it's a net loss to society.
The reasons why you might want to use this make no sense whatsoever until you realise that they started with something they wanted to build and then tried to think of reasons why people might want it afterwards. It's a solution in search of a problem. They couldn't find any problems it's suited for, so they've resorted to gobbledegook for marketing.
Just wait until you hear about how long you've got to support it. And you go to jail if you EOL it!
What's this rubbish doing on Slashdot? It's a badly written co-worker romance short story.
Anybody remember OS/2 and how Windows compatibility killed the native OS/2 application market because it was so good? They can use the same mechanism here: "Always choose OpenStack. Where VMWare is the best solution, you can arrive at that solution through OpenStack. Going directly with VMWare limits your options if it turns out it's not the best solution".
I've used Android since the first Android phone was released in 2008. Each time, I've waited for reviews before buying. Each time the reviews were good. Each time I was sorely disappointed. It took me a while to realise that reviews for Android phones have an implied "...for Android" at the end of each positive statement. "Snappy, responsive UI [for Android]". "Stable and bug-free [for Android]". "[Manufacturer] has promised frequent updates [for Android]".
Meanwhile, aside from a hardware fault with my first iPad (which was replaced on the spot on launch day, when stock was impossible to come by), I've been more than satisfied with the dozen or so Apple products I've bought in the same timeframe. I've pre-ordered an iPhone 5. Sure, I've never seen one in person, but I've got a very good idea of exactly what it's going to be like, and Apple, unlike the competition, have a track record of delivering.
I have no idea how such a dumb bug came about, but people have been complaining about it since May, when they first tried to roll out the update.
I've been keeping a close eye on that list. The unlocked version of the Xperia Pro sold in Europe has an SI of 1249-8527. That list goes up to 1249-8526 then skips ahead to 1250-1741. It's been that way for months. They specifically state in bold that they won't answer questions about when SI numbers will be added to the list ("added to the list" being a euphemism for getting the update). Until last week, the dates were completely different on the list - they showed that updates started in May, then stopped entirely at the end of June. Then people who hadn't received the update started demanding to know why the updates had stopped months ago, and the dates on the list all suddenly changed to August.
I don't know what's going on inside Sony, but there's quite clearly something very fucked up that they aren't talking about.
No, what weakens the ecosystem are the Open Handset Alliance members who promise to keep their phones up to date, then renege.
I bought an Xperia Pro in 2011 because Sony announced they'd be getting Android 4. It's currently running Android 2.3, released in 2010, because Sony have completely cocked up the rollout. The rollout started back in May, then mysteriously stopped. It might have something to do with it being so buggy it's unusable (hardcoded to AZERTY keyboards, even if you've got a QWERTY keyboard), but we have no way of knowing because Sony won't talk. They announced it was being rolled out a second time at the beginning of August, but there's no evidence of that in their shitty update software. Customer support stonewall, just saying that the rollout is ongoing. This isn't even for the latest version of Android, it's for last year's version.
This is what's damaging the ecosystem. iOS developers can happily target iOS 5+, released a year ago, and get the vast majority of users (more than 80%). If you targeted the year old Android 4+, you'd only be getting about 22% of users.
You're an idiot. I just can't tell if you're being an idiot on purpose or if you just can't help it.
In case you really are that bindingly ignorant of both mobile browsers and common sense, yes, mobile browsers do include code to handle connectivity issues.