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.
My thoughts exactly. What they were essentially saying to Android users is “I don’t want your money”.
However, a major factor contributing to the fail was also the fact the newspaper was your usual Rupert Murdoch rag…
Edited 2012-12-03 19:06 UTC
Yea iPad users and tabloid consumers are two sets quite weak in intersection.
It’s been on Android for a while now, and the failure is certainly not due to it being iOS-only (if it were, but it’s not).
http://learn.thedaily.com/android/
Edited 2012-12-03 19:38 UTC
According to that link, it was only on the Galaxy Tab. Not exactly the same thing
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.
One device, and only through Verizon.
So yeah, this thing was iPad-only.
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
Platform specific applications only succeed if they’re the very best in that field. However news publications is a preference, not something where one product is “better” than another (though the more learned of us would probably disagree with that last statement, but my point is people often chose a news source based on preference rather than benchmarkable criteria like graphics or included features).
So when there are numerous free online news sites – all of which /are/ cross platform (such is the nature of the web), these guys were painting themselves into a corner by effectively only supporting iOS.
Edited 2012-12-03 21:36 UTC
I’d say most people choose apps similarly… (especially considering that the biggest mobile category are apparently quick & casual games)
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.)
That would be a pretty dumb move and would almost certainly contribute to them failing when other buggy-whip makers are producing the same quality (or better) whips that work on all carriages.
If anything, that just proves that there’s room for other business models so that means that The Daily failed because of some other business decision; likely the fact that only a fraction of people connected to the net had access to the paper.
Sadly most people don’t give a rats arse about the quality of the reporting.
The Daily Mail is famously one of the worst papers factually and The Sun is one of the worst papers for reporting quality. Yet both are two of the most successful publications in Britain (in fact, The Daily Mail is fast becoming -if not already- one of the most popular online publications too).
Only targeting Android would equally be stupid. Thom’s comment about the iPad wasn’t a dig at the iPad (so you Apple fanboys can stop chucking your toys out the pram). He was simply saying that these days people have such a range of platforms (and not just in terms of the OS running on tablets, but in terms of computing paradigms too; be that netbooks, laptops, desktops, smart phones, games consoles, smart TVs and so on), thus targeting one niche within a niche is automatically restricting your audience. And it doesn’t take a business genius to tell you that the key to a successful product is targeting the widest demographic you can.
In short, if you intentionally restrict the numbers of users; then you have to expect only a small number of adopters. It’s genuinely that simple.
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.
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
There were a couple of Asus Transformer tablets, and at least one or two from Acer as well, along with the Motorola Xoom. I don’t know what other ones were out at the time. What I do know is that the Transformer Prime was the ‘flagship’ tablet when it was first released.
Based on the text of the link, it says the paper was available through ‘select tablets on Verizon wireless’, which leads me to believe that it wouldn’t have worked on a wifi-only Galaxy Tab. That sounds like somebody struck a deal, rather than some sort of technically-based fragmentation issue.
BTW: I’m not saying that it failed because it wasn’t widely available on Android, and probably would’ve flopped even if it were.
Ooooh, a fact? Okay then, name one (waiting….).
No, it’s clear that – like most iFanboys – you were just determined to flog that “Android fragmentation” dead horse, relevancy be damned. So you cherry-picked a single minor detail, found a single exception to fixate on, and now you’re trying to pretend that you’ve won some kind of significant victory.
If that weren’t pathetic enough, you’re also trying to pretend that fragmentation due to technical issues is the same thing as “fragmentation” due to exclusivity agreements. That’s on par with trying to criticize Microsoft for the fact that Final Cut “Pro” doesn’t run on Windows.
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?
It usually happens because of licensing deals (eg different Android partners competing for individuality by obtaining exclusivity for x, y and z).
As someone who’s written a few Android apps in the past, I can tell you that the “fragmentation” isn’t half as big of an issue as many make out. Or at least not on the standard paradigms (phones and tablets). AFAIK none of my apps have ever ran on the more abstract of Android-powered devices.
You see, Android’s SDK was written to take such things into account (unlike how iOS, which couldn’t cope with even the basics like differing aspect ratios). So while it does take a little more time refining an Android app for multiple platforms, it’s still possible and done so daily by the vast majority of Android developers.
In fact I still use one of my Android 2.2 apps daily on a host of tablets and phones running Android 4.0. I’d long since lost the source code and never bothered to rewrite it as it still runs so well.
However please don’t assume I’m trying to gloat about how everything is perfect; I’m not saying there isn’t fragmentation on Android, but I think many haters love to exaggerate the problem (much like how Apple haters loved to exaggerate the issues of the iPhone 5 carbon casing getting scratched or the left-handed reception issues on the iPhone 4).
tl;dr: 99% of Android developers manage just fine. The examples you’re thinking of are largely where licensing deals are struck as different Android partners compete for individuality.
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
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
When publishers distribute their books / magazines / newspapers, they are usually in read-only format anyway, unless it’s some really unusual interactive publication or something. So PDF is a good fit.
PDF is not proprietary for a while already:
There are other good formats for publishing – DjVu for example and etc. The point was that they are not tied to one particular system.
Edited 2012-12-04 16:39 UTC
As I’d already said, PDF is /NOT/ a read only format. In fact I’d argue that HTML is typically more a read only format as it’s generally distributed in temporary files served behind read-only HTTP protocols.
However that wouldn’t be ideal for books and possibly even magazines as the end user would likely want a permanent version of those publications, unlike with papers which are subject to change daily (sometimes even more frequently). But even in the case of books, PDF isn’t be best fit for accessibility reasons (again, as I’d already pointed out).
Take the Kindle, for example. It supports dynamic text sizes (much like how some web browsers do). Trying to mimic the same thing with PDFs wouldn’t work because you’d end up having to scroll /and/ page turn (such is the nature of zooming static pages) which is clearly a usability faux pas.
Now I’m not saying HTML is the only solution here, but when the user doesn’t care about keeping permanent issues (as is the case is online newspapers) and a publisher wants to retain ownership and allow users to control their own browsing accessibility, then it makes more sense to have a format that marks up in a similar way to HTML and using a similar distribution model to HTTP, even if that format isn’t HTML/HTTP specifically.
However I still think HTML makes a lot of sense for such publications; they have hyperlinks that give readers a chance to follow related articles or read more in depth about specific issues regarding the main article. HTML supports embedded videos and audio. And HTML offers readers a chance to comment back (personally I think it’s an over-rated feature, but then here I am doing just that). Any competing format for digital newspapers (and bare in mind we are just talking newspapers here; not books nor “ezines”) would have to /at least/ support those features if it wants to compete with the plethora of free news sites online. Simply offering a traditional newspaper in a digital format isn’t enough; not even if the digital format is presented with pretty “retina-friendly” fonts.
Edited 2012-12-04 17:25 UTC
By Kindle do you mean something like ePUB? That’s a decent format as well. Kindle’s own formats are proprietary, which I don’t like (as well as you as I understood above). PDF while not being ideal at least is not proprietary anymore.
HTML is all fine for daily papers – I agree. If by retaining control you mean paid only access. If the format involves some kind of DRM – that’s already bad and such publishers don’t interest me.
Agreed.
I think we’re pretty much of the same opinion here
Ahh, the the dreadful Wiki Effect, and getting involved in largely pointless comments…
I believe at the beginning HTML was used for implementing a CERN phone directory, for the benefit of physicists? ;p
Still, phonebook has similar specification.
Actually, ios apps are designed for morons, just as this “Newspaper” clearly demonstrated.
No wonder it didn’t much apeal to non-morons.
no, but it seems 40$/year for some Rupert Murdoch garbage was reason enough
it’s that The Daily really sucked.
An analogy of the Daily’s business model is a major news network such as CNN restricting its video news broadcasting to one brand of TV set.
Rhetoric on….
Did no one at the Daily think about that before implementation?
Rhetoric off…
Did you think about the lack of in-app Android subscription billing (at the time) and the complete and utter failure of large Android tablets (through most of The Daily’s history)?
That’s a rhetorical question too.
Wait, so now you’re going to blame the Daily’s demise on Android when their target audience was iPad users? That’s ridiculous. That makes as much sense as CNN blaming bad ratings on Vizio or Toshiba due to poor consumer sales on TV sets for Christmas. Get a clue.
I don’t understand the need to create an app for a newspaper. Newspapers sell content. They should define their needs and partner with others that provide the platform (iTunes, Google Play, Pulse… )
Creating your app and content for magazines is like each music artist having it’s own app to listen music. Makes no sense.
It did make sense because they had more news sources, their app would have been basically an aggregator.
Right now, I have on my tablet, Pulse with lots of sources, including Quartz which I found to have an abnormally high common sense.
That’s what many (most?) of apps in mobile appstores are, glorified single-webpage RSS readers, radio stations, e-books.
RSS and apps like Google Currents have removed any need for a newspaper. Couple that with the fact that as a commuter to London every day I get a free news paper in the morning and evening if I choose to read them (Metro in the morning, Evening Standard in the, er, evening) and that the Metro is a free iOS Newsstand app too (and the full paper content is published), well… why do I need to pay for another US centric news source? The reason the Daily failed was purely the economics of being a geek, nothing to do with the platforms (which, despite Thom’s excited platform waving, *is* the most popular Tablet OS in the UK.)
The fact that the “paper” was HORRIBLE had nothing to do with its shutdown I suppose. Oh well.
I was an early subscriber to the Daily, a publication that proved to be redundant in the end. When it was launched, it promised content designed to show off the then unique format and multimedia capabilities of the iPad. It did that very well, but after a short time, it proved to be clumsy and slow.
An comment made earlier, said that it wasn’t well written, perhaps now that is the case, but for the first six months, when I subscribed, it was in fact well written and sharp.
The iPad and other tablet devices offers a great many options for content, much of it free, so why limit yourself.