News Corp. has just announced its iPad-only newspaper The Daily will be closed down. What do you know, a platform-specific publication fails in the internet era. I totally did not see this coming at all. Times are changing, people. Platform-specific is so 2007.
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Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2011-04-25
There are plenty of iPad (and/or iOS)-only apps (that are succeeding by the way!) that they don't need your assistance by nonsensically redefining "iPad-only" as "Android support is fragmentary, limited, and secondary." That's just inflating the numbers by an order of magnitude!
Edited 2012-12-03 20:19 UTC
Member since:2009-07-18
Haha... That's like laughing at a buggy-whip maker for only supporting one maker of carriage and claiming that's why they failed.
1) Look at the challenges facing other "open" news sites on the web if you want to see what a challenge papers are facing in terms of monetization. They can't decide if they should be free with ads, behind a wall, or what.
2) As everyone mentions, this is a Murdoch rag. I took a look at it when it came out - the writing and general content was terrible, and given the particular direction they were taking that was unlikely to change.
3) The iPad angle is irrelevant in a news industry that's trying to find its way - unless you have an example of a newspaper for Android that has just monetized like a beast? (Not to mention they have an Android version as mentioned elsewhere.)
Member since:2010-06-24
You're misrepresenting things by interpreting "available on Galaxy Tab 10.1 using Verizon Wireless" as android fragmentation. It's like blaming Apple if an app is available only for the 3G version of iPad 2 with 32 GB flash. It's an arbitrary, plain stupid restriction.
Now, if the app was available only for Android A.B with a minimum resolution of X by Y, this would be a fragmentation issue, but this isn't.
Member since:2011-04-25
Nonsense. The Daily is a large format-only tablet app. Back in January of this year, what are the numerous Android 10" tablets that The Daily should have been made for? Before this year, what should The Daily have been targeting for 10" tablets? The fact is: the vast majority of Android apps that target tablets largely only support a small number of devices because they're the only ones being sold in any number (and even than not very well compared to iPads).
To say, this isn't a fragmentation is beyond reason: every single day an app developer decides to target a subset of Android devices and they state the reasoning being that it is too costly and expensive to try to support all of the devices across all of the versions. That is the definition of fragmentation.
Also, I post a clear refutation of Thom's claim from nearly a year ago, but do I know if The Daily remains exclusively supported on the Tab or that it doesn't actually run on non-supported tablets? No, because I don't care. But I've already done about 200% more fact checking on this story than the person who wrote it so I'll leave that to you and everyone else who disagrees with me...
Edited 2012-12-03 22:24 UTC
Member since:2005-09-21
Funny though, that has never happened, but Android apps specifically limit support to individual devices all the time. I guess Android developers are just "stupid and arbitrary" and it has nothing at all to do with fragmentation, right?
Member since:2010-06-08
they've been trying to support Android for a year
I really don't get the point of "supporting a platform" for publishing purposes altogether. Isn't there such thing as PDF (Portable Document Format). That's it - platform issues solved. Sometimes people really jump over their heads to create imaginary problems for themselves.
Edited 2012-12-04 06:18 UTC
Member since:2007-03-26
I really don't get the point of "supporting a platform" for publishing purposes altogether. Isn't there such thing as PDF (Portable Document Format). That's it - platform issues solved. Sometimes people really jump over their heads to create imaginary problems for themselves.
The "portable" in PDF doesn't mean "portable" in the context you're describing.
PDF used to be a closed format (and even now, it's still proprietary). The point of PDFs wasn't that they could be read by any device. The point was a document format that would retain it's exact formatting when migrated from platform to platform (which used to be a major problem for the press industry). Thus PDFs would embed fonts and do other such tricks which, back then, were less common. It meant that rendered documents would be as "portable" as a printed page with it's formatting retained (which was the point; so that mastered documents could be shared).
This is also why PDFs are typically considered read only (they're not, you can get editors, but the point of PDFs was they're the finalised product so were not designed to be edited) and why PDFs aren't always great for accessibility (eg text doesn't wrap when zooming, like in HTML).
"Portable" in the context you're using would better served with open specifications, which I know PDF technically is these days, but the accessibility features alone makes HTML a better fit.
In fact, HTML may have many sins these days with people building entire "web apps" and such like. But the primary goal of HTML was an open document mark up for distributing text-based content; which is precisely the specification for a newspaper. So despite HTML's many faults, I genuinely cannot think of a better format to encode such publications.
Edited 2012-12-04 13:00 UTC
Member since:2011-08-18
Actually, ios apps are designed for morons, just as this "Newspaper" clearly demonstrated.
No wonder it didn't much apeal to non-morons.
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Member since:
2011-04-25
Android fragmentation doesn't negate the fact that they've been trying to support Android for a year, or that an initial focus on iOS isn't responsible for their demise, or that Thom was wrong.