“There’s no doubt Android Market will at some point offer more applications for download and/or purchase than Apple’s App Store, as the latter’s growth has been slowing down of late, while the Android application store’s growth rate has been accelerating. In a recent report, app store analytics company Distimo forecasted that Android would surpass the App Store in size before the end of July 2011. Another research firm, Germany-based research2guidance, corroborates Distimo’s findings; the firm forecasts Android to blow past Apple’s App Store by August 2011.”
But then from memory I also pointed out that these same sources indicate that commercial developers are staying away in the droves because it’s a support nightmare and they can’t make money from it. But I suppose that wouldn’t fit with your desired message…
Maybe we should bring up our posting histories and see who has the best non-zealot track record. You’re our resident anti-Google/pro-Apple troll, while I have no qualms about posting both positive AND negative stories about both companies.
This little vendetta of yours against me is starting to slightly irritate me. Did I run over your cat or something?
A troll is a piece of nonsense that generates a reaction. Linkbaits are trolls; skeptics are not.
I, for one, am less concerned with whether someone’s flying a flag than I am with whether that flag represents reality. These silly projections and gerrymandered statistics are only “news” because they describe a novel situation, which is to say a situation that is markedly unlike the status quo of the real world that exists. They are linkbait, and, depending on the underlying political motives, propaganda; and you generally choose to propagate the pro-Android linkbait.
Android, a software stack offered free to handset manufacturers, which has been used in dozens of varied products shipped and marketed on all carriers, often for little or no money down, has, in two years, managed to pull slightly ahead in shipping volume of iPhone, a single expensive product from a single manufacturer that was, until a few weeks ago, available only on a single US carrier. iPhone is backed by the world’s largest App Store, which is heavily vetted and moderated against malice, malfunction, and IP infringement. Meanwhile the Android Market, which moderates only as a response to user complaint, has fewer total products, which counts trademark-infringing decoys and pirated ringtones, apps that don’t work (is there a single app anywhere that works on all Android models?) or explicitly require a hacked phone, wallpapers and skins, and many perfectly good pieces of code that serve only to replace built-in system functionality or fill in features that iPhone has but Android lacks (international keyboards come to mind). By all reports, the only smartphone App market that offers developers any chance at turning a profit is Apple’s.
None of that is news, which is simply because it’s blindingly obvious reality. The status quo is boring; a world in which we can talk about Android pulling ahead, changing the game, and becoming the superior software ecosystem is much more interesting. But in this world, the one that exists, that kind of talk is pure speculation (and linkbait).
Whether your bias favors Android specifically or newsworthiness in general, it is a bias, and whether OP is biased or not, he tells a true story.
This always bugs me when talking about application stores. How, exactly, can someone with nothing but a binary certify that said binary is not malicious ? Backdoors exist for a reason.
And about IP infringement, can someone check that a single application doesn’t infringe the IP of thousands of others ? Sounds like even a company as large as Apple cannot : http://blog.wolfire.com/2011/02/Counterfeit-Lugaru-on-Apple-s-App-S…
This leaves malfunction, and other quality standards like OS integration, as benefits of Apple’s App Stores. That I can agree with.
> heavily vetted and moderated against malice,
> malfunction, and IP infringement
Read: controlled by paranoid and power hungry corporation, which can’t tolerate any competition.
I so long for a PhoneOS that respects my privacy and puts me in control. Why the heck do I have to allow Angry Bird access to the internet?
Facebook is bad, but apps are probably even worse. It is so easy to build some stupid app that can harvest contact and location info from Apple drones and Google droids, just by having it make fart noises. And the sad thing is nobody will notice.
You don’t..
Get Droidwall and deny everything except for applications you want to allow.
*Rooted phones only. Kernel must include netfilter.
You don’t, at least on Android. When you install an app, it tells you what permissions the app is requesting, and then you decide whether or not to allow installation.
Of course, if the app needs internet access to do whatever it’s designed for, then of course it is allowed to phone home. But, is it really any better/worse than a PC app in this regard?
Quantity != Quallity.
I suspect there’s at least as much crapware on iOS as there is on Android… So not sure what the point of your comment is.
Wouldn’t surprise me if there is more. After all, a lot of people who had never written anything for Mac before, never used Objective-C before, and never worked with Apple’s development tools before, started pumping out apps for the Jesus Phone just to try to make a quick buck. Many of them are low quality, buggy, and were rushed to market in order to try to beat the competition.
On the other hand, Android’s development platform was build on top of technology that a lot of developers already had years of experience in.
Edited 2011-05-06 04:55 UTC
How ironic that you’re proclaiming Java/Android as a superior foundation to that of ObjC and Cocoa when a major portion of Java’s development is based on Objective-C.
Sorry, but Apple’s APIs have been honed for over 25 years.
So what? Java was influenced by many other languages/APIs e.g. Smalltalk.
Overall, how typical of you.
Edited 2011-05-06 06:26 UTC
I’ve been doing iOS programming for a while and have already done plenty of Android as well. I’d say the language and API on Android are defnitely better. It’s ironic that people always proclaim Apple’s APIs to be so clean you can eat your meal off.
Just a few things off the top of my head:
– The fact you can do obj.that = 1 as a shortcut for [obj setThat:1] but you can’t do obj.someMethod() and must in that case stick with [obj someMethod:blah].
– The stupid need to define a property three times across two files! Synthesize my ass.
– (void)thisVerbosity:(int)blah withStupidParameterDefinitions:(int)my adNauseum:(int)god
– The fact that there’s no *proper* layout mechanisms for iOS leading to lots of code that goes assuming heights of something happen to always be 44 pixels high. No wonder mobile developers are afraid of the things we’ve been building for decades now: resizeable windows.
– The fact that you can’t visually layout a preferences table in Interface Builder. It’s always: some things you can do one way, some things you can only do another way.
– Hack for this, hack for that. Want to do text entry validation character for character as it’s typed? Sure, but you need to resort to an unsupported API that Apple won’t approve! Or … Want a light blue IUNavigationItem? ‘There’s a hack for that’! Hacks all over the place for doing things that should be exposed in the API.
I’d say Java was based on C++, and Wikipedia’s article on Java agrees with me : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_%28software_platform%29#H… . But of course, we’re still talking about object-oriented (or, in c++’s case, multi-paradigm) derivatives of C, so your mistake doesn’t matter so much. No, what worries me most about your comment is that you totally fail to understand the parent poster’s point.
Most developers learn Java as part of their studies. Some learn C# because their school has some commercial contract with Microsoft. But only a minority of developers learn Objective C at school. Because it never caught up outside of the Mac world, which is only 10% of desktop computers.
As iOS devices become more popular, ObjC becomes more attractive and as such there’ll probably be an increasing number of schools who teach Objective-C in the upcoming years. But most of the current App Store catalog is software coded by people who have never coded anything in Objective C before. Which has implications in the area of software quality.
Edited 2011-05-06 11:36 UTC
4-5%.
It sure does. There’s this assumption that iOS App Store = good amazing super apps, Android Marketplace = nothing but shitty crap.
Reality, however, is different: they’re both basically 99% crap, with 1% good applications. Those 99% are badly coded, crash-prone, have HORRIBLE user interfaces, and are very confusing to use.
Edited 2011-05-06 11:55 UTC
Judging by the average quality of PHP code out there, I would say that language popularity has little bearing on software quality
Also, from my personal experience with the industry, I see that good developers have no problem picking up new languages/frameworks/technologies. They actually seek these things out. Whereas mediocre developers tend to stick to what they know.
Judging code quality is unfair : if you only took this criteria, all programming languages would equally awfully suck, save for the most obscure ones (brainf–k, assembly) which force a developer to adopt good programming practices or get lost
Sure, the more proficient you’re with programming, the easiest it is to pick up a new language. However, you can’t deny that there’s a learning period, and that the first programs which one writes in a language are likely to be imperfect in more than one way.
For an extreme example : compare the amount of “for” loops in MATLAB programs written by a novice and an expert
Edited 2011-05-06 13:12 UTC
Actually, Java borrowed features from a lot of languages, including C++, Smalltalk, and I believe interfaces came from ObjC. But mostly it is based on Smalltalk and C++.
Apparently you have a reading comprehension problem? There was never any mention of language or API quality in my comment. Only of popularity and developer experience with a given technology. I never said there was anything wrong with the Apple APIs or that it hadn’t been around for a long time. I said not a lot of people had experience working with it because not many people had experience developing Mac applications. I’m not sure how you took that and transformed it into something like “Apple’s API sucks and hasn’t been around a long time.”
Edited 2011-05-06 12:22 UTC
I recall a discussion about a year or so ago where you and some others claimed that windows was bloated because it kept the API compatible with things developed 10 years or so ago while OSX 10.x.x was “modern” because they basically throw out the old code and started fresh every x year or so?
Anyone else remembers that discussion or am I hallucinating it??
Depends on what product you’re rooting for, doesn’t it?
I like the product and it sells well: quantity = quality.
I dont like the product but it sells well: quantity != quality.
I like the product and it doesn’t sell: quantity != quality.
I don’t like product and it doesn’t sell: quantity = quality.
Edited 2011-05-06 15:13 UTC
How many of them are OpenSource which we can trust ?
More than you’ll find in iPhone’s AppStore I suspect…
Based on the number of free apps and the projects hosted on google code I suspect that the ratio is 1 to 3 to androids favor.
Are those projects on Google Code you are considering all for Android though? There are a lot of projects on Google code that are not for Android after all. So not sure that’s a valid metric to say anything about the popularity of Android vs. iOS unless you were able to consider only Android projects on Google Code.
Open standards vs. closed proprietary vendor lock in anyone? IBM learned that lesson in the early 80s when they opened the specs for the PC so anyone could build PC compatible systems. This nearly put Apple out of business.
Seems Apple hasn’t learned the lesson to this day. Open standards will trump closed proprietary vendor lock-in all of them when it comes to user adoption.
Edited 2011-05-06 04:39 UTC
I think from the company point of view Apple decisions regarding both PCs and iDevices have been much more profitable than those of IBM … so from a user point of view your ideas are debatable, from the industry point of view surely you are right, but from the company point of view you are completely wrong … IBM is out of this business.
IBM was never serious about being a mainstream PC manufacturer. They were always a big iron seller and have returned to what they know best. The odds of IBM still being around in 50 years are far better than those of Apple or Dell.
FTFY
IBM published technical specs for PCs, but that was common practice back then. They never intended to have an open PC market, and fought hard to prevent it. In fact, the single biggest strategic mistake they may have ever made was in letting MS market IBM PC-DOS as MS-DOS to other OEMs.
I get where you’re going, but I’m just not sure that was the best example.
Just my 2 pennies…
I’m anxiously awaiting the new top 20 list for fart applications.