There is absolutely NOTHING demonstrating that this qualifies as "research". Quite the contrary in fact -- Yankee Group has a long and ugly history of PR piece "surveys" that can only possible yield a desired outcome.
Do you have any idea what the methodology of the study is? I suspect not.
As soon as the iPhone is available on other carriers, it's really over for Android.
In the rest of the world everyone carries the iPhone. They also carry everything else. In my country, Canada, the iPhone got a good lead but now the carriers are push and are far more interested in Android devices.
In the US it's always held like the iPhone would own the market if only they weren't limited to AT&T. I find that remarkably simplistic -- AT&T, tied for the largest customer base, completely ignored Android, and then went out of their way to gimp it, all while very, very heavily promoting the iPhone. If AT&T weren't so strongly committed to the iPhone, I doubt it would have the presence it has, more providers or not.
Though of course the tension grows between AT&T and Apple, and AT&T is now fielding the Samsung Galaxy S, a phone that elevates their Android offers manyfold.
I sent a query to the Yankee Group shortly after seeing that CNN article. The results are unbelievable: There have been various prior studies that found quite different numbers.
Even if you ignored prior studies, it is a basic human tendency to justify what you've purchased, making excuses for one's decision even against overwhelming evidence. Even if Android phones were shocking their users, I would still expect at least 2/3rds of users to claim that they love it.
And of course Android has been getting pretty damn decent. The majority of phones are running 2.1 now, and while 6 months ago you were a second class citizen with an Android phone, nowadays most major apps are doing parallel releases given the growth of the Android ecosystem. If Android made it through the ugly months, with mediocre hardware, quirky OS', and no software support, I find it hard to believe it would do so poorly now.
So my query to Yankee was whether that sentence in the CNN article was correct, and also what their methodology is. They didn't respond. Does *anyone* know what their methodology was?
I can say right now that the 20% thing, if quoted accurately, guarantees that their survey is completely tainted and is utterly worthless. Maybe they posted a voluntary survey at mac.com or something.
But nonetheless, every Mac/Apple/iPhone site and fanatic is posting the results to assure themselves that they're richer, prettier, more intelligent, etc.
Although to be fair, its an antenna that - when held a certain very specific and unusual way - is a little worse than the 3G, but when used in any other conceivable way is vastly superior.
Do you have actual metrics to back that up?
Straight from the horse's mouth, Steve said that the iPhone 4, with the "vastly superior" antenna, drops more calls than the 3GS. Clearly the holding technique isn't quite so unusual.
Apple's demonstration was unbelievably deceptive: They are implying that the problem is a death grip problem (which is actually usual). Steve went on to say that the 3GS had less dropped calls because people used a case, even though a case does absolutely nothing to stop the downsides of a death grip. The 3GS already, for all intents and purposes, HAD a case, so third party cases are irrelevant.
The problem is the external antenna, and a very casual, non-death grip causes the serious reception issue. There's a reason why no one else uses an external antenna anymore. Well, except for Apple who thought it looked cool. Only not so cool in a bumper.
I doubt you would. I have a 40 GB Fujitsu MPG3409AT-E hard disk from 2001 that is still running yet the so called best Seagate Pulsar - the "first enterprise-ready" SSD failed after less than a year of database usage.
So with your sample size of one you are prepared to make absolute statements about an entire technology?
Bottom line: Do not trust SSDs.
I generally don't trust any storage device, be it magnetic disk, SSD, backup tape, or burned DVD. I take the risk (and yield the incredible benefits) of SLC SSD because I already have reliability systems in place if one or more of them fail on me.
Yeah, guy, Steve Jobs said it at D8. Feel free to do a search.
I believe the privacy angle you're referring is in
NO IT ISN'T.
Listen, I realize you might have a problem with threaded conversation, and you seem to be trying to mesh every comment with the submission, but that just isn't how it works. See, I was replying to someone who made a command, and this thread carried on from there.
Judging from your statements, it appears you didn't read the article
Are you new to Slashdot? You understand the conversational nature? You might want to get acquainted with theads and conversations.
The article is about hacked iTunes accounts with a stored credit card and the fact that hackers used them to purchase apps.
Fascinating. So you have inside knowledge on what happens? No, I don't think you do.
You seem to be confused, and should probably re-read the article. These apps are not scams, they are actually simple book apps, in and of themselves, unremarkable.
Did I say otherwise somewhere? If so, I apologize, but I'm quite sure I'm made no insinuation that these were any sort of exploit.
Instead they were just garbage fillers, used as a target for an exploit (the mechanism of which we have no idea of, though curiously lots of people are trotting out the Apple-can't-be-to-blamed simple passoard canards et al...which is curious because on any modern system you simply can't do dictionary attacks. Anyways...). I replied to a guy who made some argument for Apple's curation claims, and my point is simply that these "unremarkable book apps" have been widely noted as being trash (which is why it earned attention -- no one would seriously buy it). Curation indeed.
So a total of 48 apps out of 200,000+ were bad 'Apples', and suddenly the entire App store is a 'dismal failure'
Still trying to figure out who you are quoting with the dismal failure bit. Or are you setting up a strawman, ready for the heroic striking down?
However there are countless terrible, terrible apps in the App Store. There are countless terrible, terrible apps in the Android market. The difference is that one of these claims that they curate their market (comparing themselves to a fine museum) -- their founder openly saying that user privacy is why they curate their market -- and the other makes no such notion (but instead protects privacy by forcing apps to declare rights requests that users need to allow). I'll let you guess which is which.
The important point is not that a rogue developer was able to get it, but that Apple was able to catch him, stop him, and let their users know about it quickly.
Apple didn't catch him. The "apps" in question were absolute trash (along with the 300+ iFart apps), making a mockery of any illusions that it's a curated garden.
However just to be clear, we already know that the Android market can do precisely the same thing, forcefully reaching out and removing rogue content. Instead of any ridiculous notions of curation, however, Android relies upon a permissions system that makes a user aware of the potential reach of any given application. It is far from perfect, yet despite some ignorant criticism directed at it recently it beats the hell out of anything on the iPhone.
Not really sure why we're talking about the phones though. The exploit in this case didn't necessarily have much to do with the actual handsets themselves.
The whole porn thing is so incredibly boring, and casts a pall over technology. No, Blu-ray didn't win because of porn. Nor did VHS win because of porn. No is Flash going to die because of porn.
But really the cutest is when someone desperate for attention, hoping onto the dogpile, becomes an industry. Especially when it's encrusted with caveats ("if HTML5 was supported by all browsers, they all supported the same codecs, they all..."). Boring.
As a ton of other people have stated, how is this different from the tons of adblockers (or ClickToFlash) that already exist?
Because it's in the official Safari build, released by Apple.
Firefox does not come with an ad blocker. Opera doesn't come with an ad blocker. IE doesn't come with an ad blocker. Chrome of course doesn't come with an ad blocker.
Now a company that just moved (very heavily) into ads is releasing an ad blocker in their browser. It would almost seem like they're trying to hasten the death of the web, however meager their attempt, to push content producers to a walled garden of pay only content.
And then you can exasperate about how you want free content without ads.
Yes, the point being: If you don't like it, don't go there. Find content that doesn't have annoying ads and multi-page content.
Apple is, ultimately, selling their product (Safari, selling in the sense of trying to get marketshare) on the backs of content producers.
"Look at all this clean content we bring you!" (when actually they don't bring anything, and undermine that which they claim to make easier to consume)
Case in point, when I read a magazine, I certainly see advertisements...but those advertisements are not animated, they do not make it difficult to turn the page and read a new article, they do not cause a pile of advertisements to appear underneath the magazine, etc.
I find current magazines to be close to intolerable because of advertisements (and that's a case where you are purportedly paying for the content!) Not only is a serious portion of the space dedicated to ads, many of them trying their best to confuse you into thinking they're content, they lead to other insidious behaviors-
-Magazines often cut out a large percentage of page numbers specifically to force you to scan through ads. It's also why they split stories. The ad companies have a lot of research driving this.
-You have a conflict of interest when the authors' jobs depend upon the people they're talking about in many cases. Many computer-related magazines were well known for soft-balling companies that advertised heavily.
Advertisements suck. They pervert the entire content system.
You'll find a lot of misinformation about the Safari Reader feature because it removes ads and combines those incredibly annoying multi-page articles into one page
If they're annoying, why do you read them? Why do you go to sites with ads you don't like?
I'm not saying that in a judgmental fashion -- I use ABP and greatly enjoy it. I just realize that I'm having my cake and eating it too, and it's grossly unsustainable. Will Apple provide a similar feature to block iAds from the iOS ecosystem?
We need to revisit micropayments. The ad supported model is a continual cycle of unwanted side effects.
Android makes money for Google for one very simple reason: Ads. Nothing more. Google bought Android because they wanted to have a mobile ad platform that they controlled.
They're doing an amazingly poor job of it, then. I've been using Android for a year now, and I honestly don't remember the last time I saw an ad outside of the browser.
No, what ensures this doesn't happen is that Google will pay handset makers to stay with Google. It's essentially AdSense applied to mobiles.
So what's the problem? Motorola is already selling one Android device with Bing on it. Turns out there are a lot of companies that will pay money to have their systems on handsets. APPLE, for crying out loud, could make a deal to provide primary services in Android with one of the handset makers, and there is nothing in the Android ecosystem that blocks that. I think you're missing the core point here.
No. Google made a calculation: either stay as one play of many on iPhone (and other phones), or burn their bridges with Apple, and forge ahead being the dominant player on their own mobile OS.
See, there's a core theme that you're missing here. It isn't Google's OS. Motorola can completely pull out Google hook-ins. HTC can. Samsung can. Sony can. If customers preferred Bing, they could do it for competitive reasons. Making Android guaranteed Google nothing.
Google had been sitting on Android for some time (actually before the iPhone project even began). It really took off, however, when it became clear that Apple was poised to dominate the smartphone market. A single vendor dominating would have been devastating to Google.
So you think Google should let Microsoft insert Bing search results and ads into Google search results pages?
This is bordering on comical.
The closest analogy -- even though analogies are a horrendous way to understand a point -- would be Dell declaring that all webpages showing ads on Dell computers have to run the ads through Dell's ad network. Your analogy is terrible.
You have to opt-in to iAd and other ad networks are still running today in third party iPhone apps, Apple has not banned third party networks, and the limitation on the third party networks equally apply also for Apple's own iAd.
Apple effectively made iAd the only option for in-application advertisements, because ad networks can't run without analytics. And no, the restrictions don't apply to Apple, and it's ludicrous to claim they do. The restriction was completely made to target Google/Admob, just as 3.3.1 targeted Flash.
Nonetheless, I have no doubt that Google is going to double down on Android. It's interesting that every time Steve Jobs has one of his petulant tantrums the rate of Android development accelerates. While a year ago it seemed like a generally unloved step-child, and we know that Google low-balled it to avoid offending Apple, today it feels like a rocket ship. Every restriction Apple imposes will be their own undoing.
Android is not a legitimate mobile phone software business but rather a way to leverage Google's Web ad monopoly into mobile ads?
Not a very clever retort. Lots of businesses have strategic projects that couldn't stand alone, but that have critical organizational importance. Android is that way for Google. To say that makes it "not legitimate" is facile.
Also, try to ignore the fact that if Google didn't have Android, they wouldn't be locked out of iOS. Because it really fucks up your whole argument.
Yeah, too bad I don't believe that. Apple effectively cut out every other large competitive advertiser on the heels of launching their own ad network. Unless you have a time machine, you have zero knowledge of what would have happened if Google didn't have Android. I would posit that Google would be looking at a grim future where the future of computing -- the mobile space -- had completely locked them out.
I mean it's not exactly startling that your direct competition doesn't want you advertising on their device.
So when you buy an iPhone, you accept that it's still Steve's? Wow.
Note that we're talking about ads in third-party applications. Meaning as a third-party application developer, Apple has now said "Oh, and by the way if you want to advertise, your only real choice is us." How is that defensible?
And do you accept that the Safari browser on the iOS devices has the right to purge all web ads and replace them with Apple ads? Why not, right?
One of the reasons Android is an important project for Google -- it makes them little, if any, money, despite a half-baked plan to sell their own handset -- is exactly this scenario. Google's fear was that a single vendor would have too much control to cut them out. So Android was birthed, and there are many vendors. And for those who might not know, any Android handset vendor has the full ability to replace Google with Bing, or to cut out Google ads in other forms, yet the "fragmentation" of the market ensures that there isn't an overly one-sided power distribution.
So is Apple being testy because of Android....or is this the gameplan all along, and Android was a good pre-emptive strike?
The GPU of the G1 is horribly underpowered, the processor not supporting NEON, and the RAM on the device is barely capable of running the OS alone. The G1 is the reason gaming on the Android platform is still so immature.
Phones like the Nexus One, the Samsung Galaxy S, and the Moto Droid are magnitudes more powerful in the graphics department.
Or do I give up the 25% of the market that is Android 1.5?
Most of the phones that run 1.5 right now are terribly underpowered -- OpenGL on a G1 is almost a sick joke.
If you're targeting OpenGL, you probably should cut your losses and cut them.
If you look at a recent app produced by Google, the Twitter app, you'll see that it is unavailable to a huge percentage of the market because they don't support older versions of Android with it.
The Twitter application is an Android showpiece app, which is why it targets 2.1. They wanted to use animated wallpaper, quick contact bars, and so on, to highlight the best of the contemporary platform. Aside from the fact that about 50% of Android phones are running 2.1 right now, most other phones are going to see a 2.1 upgrade in the relatively short term. I suspect Google intentionally targets 2.1 to try to motivate the vendors to expedite their upgrades.
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There is absolutely NOTHING demonstrating that this qualifies as "research". Quite the contrary in fact -- Yankee Group has a long and ugly history of PR piece "surveys" that can only possible yield a desired outcome.
Do you have any idea what the methodology of the study is? I suspect not.
In the rest of the world everyone carries the iPhone. They also carry everything else. In my country, Canada, the iPhone got a good lead but now the carriers are push and are far more interested in Android devices.
In the US it's always held like the iPhone would own the market if only they weren't limited to AT&T. I find that remarkably simplistic -- AT&T, tied for the largest customer base, completely ignored Android, and then went out of their way to gimp it, all while very, very heavily promoting the iPhone. If AT&T weren't so strongly committed to the iPhone, I doubt it would have the presence it has, more providers or not.
Though of course the tension grows between AT&T and Apple, and AT&T is now fielding the Samsung Galaxy S, a phone that elevates their Android offers manyfold.
I sent a query to the Yankee Group shortly after seeing that CNN article. The results are unbelievable: There have been various prior studies that found quite different numbers.
Even if you ignored prior studies, it is a basic human tendency to justify what you've purchased, making excuses for one's decision even against overwhelming evidence. Even if Android phones were shocking their users, I would still expect at least 2/3rds of users to claim that they love it.
And of course Android has been getting pretty damn decent. The majority of phones are running 2.1 now, and while 6 months ago you were a second class citizen with an Android phone, nowadays most major apps are doing parallel releases given the growth of the Android ecosystem. If Android made it through the ugly months, with mediocre hardware, quirky OS', and no software support, I find it hard to believe it would do so poorly now.
So my query to Yankee was whether that sentence in the CNN article was correct, and also what their methodology is. They didn't respond. Does *anyone* know what their methodology was?
I can say right now that the 20% thing, if quoted accurately, guarantees that their survey is completely tainted and is utterly worthless. Maybe they posted a voluntary survey at mac.com or something.
But nonetheless, every Mac/Apple/iPhone site and fanatic is posting the results to assure themselves that they're richer, prettier, more intelligent, etc.
Do you have actual metrics to back that up?
Straight from the horse's mouth, Steve said that the iPhone 4, with the "vastly superior" antenna, drops more calls than the 3GS. Clearly the holding technique isn't quite so unusual.
Apple's demonstration was unbelievably deceptive: They are implying that the problem is a death grip problem (which is actually usual). Steve went on to say that the 3GS had less dropped calls because people used a case, even though a case does absolutely nothing to stop the downsides of a death grip. The 3GS already, for all intents and purposes, HAD a case, so third party cases are irrelevant.
The problem is the external antenna, and a very casual, non-death grip causes the serious reception issue. There's a reason why no one else uses an external antenna anymore. Well, except for Apple who thought it looked cool. Only not so cool in a bumper.
So with your sample size of one you are prepared to make absolute statements about an entire technology?
I generally don't trust any storage device, be it magnetic disk, SSD, backup tape, or burned DVD. I take the risk (and yield the incredible benefits) of SLC SSD because I already have reliability systems in place if one or more of them fail on me.
Yeah, guy, Steve Jobs said it at D8. Feel free to do a search.
NO IT ISN'T.
Listen, I realize you might have a problem with threaded conversation, and you seem to be trying to mesh every comment with the submission, but that just isn't how it works. See, I was replying to someone who made a command, and this thread carried on from there.
Are you new to Slashdot? You understand the conversational nature? You might want to get acquainted with theads and conversations.
Fascinating. So you have inside knowledge on what happens? No, I don't think you do.
Did I say otherwise somewhere? If so, I apologize, but I'm quite sure I'm made no insinuation that these were any sort of exploit.
Instead they were just garbage fillers, used as a target for an exploit (the mechanism of which we have no idea of, though curiously lots of people are trotting out the Apple-can't-be-to-blamed simple passoard canards et al...which is curious because on any modern system you simply can't do dictionary attacks. Anyways...). I replied to a guy who made some argument for Apple's curation claims, and my point is simply that these "unremarkable book apps" have been widely noted as being trash (which is why it earned attention -- no one would seriously buy it). Curation indeed.
Still trying to figure out who you are quoting with the dismal failure bit. Or are you setting up a strawman, ready for the heroic striking down?
However there are countless terrible, terrible apps in the App Store. There are countless terrible, terrible apps in the Android market. The difference is that one of these claims that they curate their market (comparing themselves to a fine museum) -- their founder openly saying that user privacy is why they curate their market -- and the other makes no such notion (but instead protects privacy by forcing apps to declare rights requests that users need to allow). I'll let you guess which is which.
Apple didn't catch him. The "apps" in question were absolute trash (along with the 300+ iFart apps), making a mockery of any illusions that it's a curated garden.
However just to be clear, we already know that the Android market can do precisely the same thing, forcefully reaching out and removing rogue content. Instead of any ridiculous notions of curation, however, Android relies upon a permissions system that makes a user aware of the potential reach of any given application. It is far from perfect, yet despite some ignorant criticism directed at it recently it beats the hell out of anything on the iPhone.
Not really sure why we're talking about the phones though. The exploit in this case didn't necessarily have much to do with the actual handsets themselves.
The whole porn thing is so incredibly boring, and casts a pall over technology. No, Blu-ray didn't win because of porn. Nor did VHS win because of porn. No is Flash going to die because of porn.
But really the cutest is when someone desperate for attention, hoping onto the dogpile, becomes an industry. Especially when it's encrusted with caveats ("if HTML5 was supported by all browsers, they all supported the same codecs, they all..."). Boring.
One post marked "offtopic" (seriously? Go for overrated or troll instead, but offtopic? No.), the other marked troll.
So naive. Safari is not doing you favors offering "readability", no matter how deluded you might be.
Because it's in the official Safari build, released by Apple.
Firefox does not come with an ad blocker. Opera doesn't come with an ad blocker. IE doesn't come with an ad blocker. Chrome of course doesn't come with an ad blocker.
Now a company that just moved (very heavily) into ads is releasing an ad blocker in their browser. It would almost seem like they're trying to hasten the death of the web, however meager their attempt, to push content producers to a walled garden of pay only content.
And then you can exasperate about how you want free content without ads.
Yes, the point being: If you don't like it, don't go there. Find content that doesn't have annoying ads and multi-page content.
Apple is, ultimately, selling their product (Safari, selling in the sense of trying to get marketshare) on the backs of content producers.
"Look at all this clean content we bring you!" (when actually they don't bring anything, and undermine that which they claim to make easier to consume)
I find current magazines to be close to intolerable because of advertisements (and that's a case where you are purportedly paying for the content!) Not only is a serious portion of the space dedicated to ads, many of them trying their best to confuse you into thinking they're content, they lead to other insidious behaviors-
-Magazines often cut out a large percentage of page numbers specifically to force you to scan through ads. It's also why they split stories. The ad companies have a lot of research driving this.
-You have a conflict of interest when the authors' jobs depend upon the people they're talking about in many cases. Many computer-related magazines were well known for soft-balling companies that advertised heavily.
Advertisements suck. They pervert the entire content system.
If they're annoying, why do you read them? Why do you go to sites with ads you don't like?
I'm not saying that in a judgmental fashion -- I use ABP and greatly enjoy it. I just realize that I'm having my cake and eating it too, and it's grossly unsustainable. Will Apple provide a similar feature to block iAds from the iOS ecosystem?
We need to revisit micropayments. The ad supported model is a continual cycle of unwanted side effects.
They're doing an amazingly poor job of it, then. I've been using Android for a year now, and I honestly don't remember the last time I saw an ad outside of the browser.
So what's the problem? Motorola is already selling one Android device with Bing on it. Turns out there are a lot of companies that will pay money to have their systems on handsets. APPLE, for crying out loud, could make a deal to provide primary services in Android with one of the handset makers, and there is nothing in the Android ecosystem that blocks that. I think you're missing the core point here.
See, there's a core theme that you're missing here. It isn't Google's OS. Motorola can completely pull out Google hook-ins. HTC can. Samsung can. Sony can. If customers preferred Bing, they could do it for competitive reasons. Making Android guaranteed Google nothing.
Google had been sitting on Android for some time (actually before the iPhone project even began). It really took off, however, when it became clear that Apple was poised to dominate the smartphone market. A single vendor dominating would have been devastating to Google.
This is bordering on comical.
The closest analogy -- even though analogies are a horrendous way to understand a point -- would be Dell declaring that all webpages showing ads on Dell computers have to run the ads through Dell's ad network. Your analogy is terrible.
Apple effectively made iAd the only option for in-application advertisements, because ad networks can't run without analytics. And no, the restrictions don't apply to Apple, and it's ludicrous to claim they do. The restriction was completely made to target Google/Admob, just as 3.3.1 targeted Flash.
You clearly have nothing to do with business.
Nonetheless, I have no doubt that Google is going to double down on Android. It's interesting that every time Steve Jobs has one of his petulant tantrums the rate of Android development accelerates. While a year ago it seemed like a generally unloved step-child, and we know that Google low-balled it to avoid offending Apple, today it feels like a rocket ship. Every restriction Apple imposes will be their own undoing.
Not a very clever retort. Lots of businesses have strategic projects that couldn't stand alone, but that have critical organizational importance. Android is that way for Google. To say that makes it "not legitimate" is facile.
Yeah, too bad I don't believe that. Apple effectively cut out every other large competitive advertiser on the heels of launching their own ad network. Unless you have a time machine, you have zero knowledge of what would have happened if Google didn't have Android. I would posit that Google would be looking at a grim future where the future of computing -- the mobile space -- had completely locked them out.
So when you buy an iPhone, you accept that it's still Steve's? Wow.
Note that we're talking about ads in third-party applications. Meaning as a third-party application developer, Apple has now said "Oh, and by the way if you want to advertise, your only real choice is us." How is that defensible?
And do you accept that the Safari browser on the iOS devices has the right to purge all web ads and replace them with Apple ads? Why not, right?
You can't reasonably run ads without analytics. The entire ad industry depends upon analytics.
One of the reasons Android is an important project for Google -- it makes them little, if any, money, despite a half-baked plan to sell their own handset -- is exactly this scenario. Google's fear was that a single vendor would have too much control to cut them out. So Android was birthed, and there are many vendors. And for those who might not know, any Android handset vendor has the full ability to replace Google with Bing, or to cut out Google ads in other forms, yet the "fragmentation" of the market ensures that there isn't an overly one-sided power distribution.
So is Apple being testy because of Android....or is this the gameplan all along, and Android was a good pre-emptive strike?
The GPU of the G1 is horribly underpowered, the processor not supporting NEON, and the RAM on the device is barely capable of running the OS alone. The G1 is the reason gaming on the Android platform is still so immature.
Phones like the Nexus One, the Samsung Galaxy S, and the Moto Droid are magnitudes more powerful in the graphics department.
Most of the phones that run 1.5 right now are terribly underpowered -- OpenGL on a G1 is almost a sick joke.
If you're targeting OpenGL, you probably should cut your losses and cut them.
The Twitter application is an Android showpiece app, which is why it targets 2.1. They wanted to use animated wallpaper, quick contact bars, and so on, to highlight the best of the contemporary platform. Aside from the fact that about 50% of Android phones are running 2.1 right now, most other phones are going to see a 2.1 upgrade in the relatively short term. I suspect Google intentionally targets 2.1 to try to motivate the vendors to expedite their upgrades.