Devs Bet Big On Android Over Apple's iOS 328
CWmike writes "A majority of mobile app developers see Android as the smart bet over the long run even as they vote for Apple's iOS in the short term, according to a survey conducted jointly by Appcelerator and IDC. The survey polled more than 2,300 developers who use Appcelerator's Titanium cross-platform compiler to produce iOS and Android native apps. Of the 2,300 polled, 59% said that Android had the 'best long-term outlook,' compared with just 35% who pegged Apple's iOS with that label. But three out of four said that iOS offers the best 'near-term' outlook, with 76% tagging Apple's operating system as the best revenue opportunity."
Not a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not really a surprise considering it is the only mainstream open platform not tied to any particular hardware.
Re:Not a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
It's even less surprising when you read who they asked: "2,300 developers who use Appcelerator's Titanium cross-platform compiler to produce iOS and Android native apps".
Why doesn't the headline read "People who use cross compilers have a reason for that choice". Despite what the title suggests, my guess is that Appcelerator users aren't the majority of mobile developers.
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There are a lot of 5 lines-of-code tweaks I would like to apply to my phone. But as far as I know the Droid X will brick me if I try rolling my own. Not exactly as open as the Nokia Linux phone.
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This is not really a surprise considering it is the only mainstream open platform not tied to any particular hardware.
You forgot Symbian..been around since 2002.
Re:Not a surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
...and Meego. Both Symbian and Meego are more open than Android (iinm), because there is no one member controlling it - ie they both have councils/etc.
In comparison, Android is a poor bet, if you ask me. I say this not only because it isn't very open to collaboration, but also because it is designed to profit Google in ways that other key players also want to profit - ie services. Sure, they can fork it and do whatever they want, but that just becomes fragmented and is only Android in name (which might be enough to dumb consumers, I suppose). Manufacturers like that they can see the code, but to changing it means it isn't 'comes with Google'.
Android is "Open" as in "Window", but not "Open" as in "Door".
But I'm sure some would disagree...and I'm quite interested in the counter arguments. So 'fire!'...
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> Meego will take a while to catch on
Maybe - time will tell - but as a Meego developer, I can say that there is quite some interest in hiring people with such skills - more so than Maemo ever was anyway (IMO). I think some entities actually get that Android isn't quite what they want - good enough for now perhaps and better than iOS and Microsoft, but not much better than peeing in their pants to stay warm ;)
That sounds about right.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple users are used to paying for costly proprietary applications, so of course there is a better revenue opportunity. I just find it so disgusting that there are so many developers all of a sudden interested in making money from their code. It seems Apple is doing more to destroy the environment created by the open source community than any other company...
Re:That sounds about right.... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh no! people want to make money off of their work! That's capitalist talk, off with their heads!
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It's why they call the death penalty "capital punishment".
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What the heck are you talking about? Did you even read the GP?
Re:That sounds about right.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Face it. If you're a Verizon customer, a Sprint customer, or a T-Mobile customer, then your only smart phone choice is... Android.
Windows 7 phones are still vaporware, and no one wants the soon to be unsupported Windows 6.5. Blackberry failed to up their game significantly, and it shows. Palm's WebOS was a non-starter.
So what's left on the shelf? Android.
The way I see it, the majority of the people who're buying Android aren't "choosing" Android.
Walk into a Verizon store, or Sprint store, or T-Mobile store, and the only viable options available are Android phones. Faced with no real choice, customers examine a couple of nearly identical plastic phones for a few minutes, find the same set of features on each... and then proceed to buy the cheapest one.
Hence Android's sales growth.
What will tell the tail is the day AT&T loses its exclusivity agreement, and the iPhone hits Verizon...
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In the UK the iPhone is available on all the major networks, yet Android phones still sell -- I don't know how well, I know a lot more people with Android phones than iPhones, but it's an unrepresentative sample.
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That doesn't mean that Android sales in the UK didn't get a helping hand from the US networks. Smartphone platforms have a chicken-and-egg problem; customers need to know that there is a viable ecosystem of applications, and the people developing those applications need to know that there is a market for them.
What has happened, in my opinion, AT&T's iPhone exclusivity in the US has given Android a leg-up, which has provided a customer base for the Android Marketplace, which has made Android a more attr
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What you want is, in other words, more capitalism: people shouldn't own the fruits of their labour, but rather have to give it up for free, getting paid for selling their work hours instead. That's practically Marx's definition of the capitalist mode of exploitation. Of course, in your mind, I suppose the capitalist would have to be the state (otherwise, the people owning the work would still be able to get paid over and over), so your perfect mode of capitalist exploitation would be some kind of state capi
Re:That sounds about right.... (Score:4, Funny)
OK how about us who has make games where man-lives are wasted? I am so in the red that it's not even funny.
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So in a ideal capitalist society, a person would be encouraged to save everyone a million man-hours because if he made something that useful he'd become rich.
In an idealized communist society, it's to each according to need and from each according to ability, so that person would be encouraged to save everyone a million man hours for no reward, but just because he has the ability.
In your idealized society, you think he should be paid based on... how many hours he worked? Your hybrid economic system removes
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In your idealized society, you think he should be paid based on... how many hours he worked? Your hybrid economic system removes both the altruistic motive of communism and the reward motive of capitalism.
So you've invented the worst economic system possible. Congrats!
Hmm. So when a plumber comes to fix the hot water tank, I should pay him based on how many hours he saves me heating water manually on the stove over the course of owning my home?
When a mechanic replaces a snapped timing belt he should be paid
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Except I pay both the mechanic and the plumber by the hour, or even a fixed job rate. This correlates much closer with the time it will take them to complete the job than than with an "amount of man-hours they have saved humanity".
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. If it saves 1 million man hours, then it's a net win for the human race . Yay.
I read an article recently that basically blames IT for the destruction of the middle class.
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So by this logic, if he wants to have a stable income, he should produce a really shit program that will save nobody any time, but that he can "continuously improve" for the rest of his life, and get paid $100 for every hour he works, resulting in something much more approaching a "net zero" for humanity?
Congratulations, you've just declared government bureaucracy your economic model of choice.
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So by this logic, if he wants to have a stable income, he should produce a really shit program that will save nobody any time, but that he can "continuously improve" for the rest of his life, and get paid $100 for every hour he works, resulting in something much more approaching a "net zero" for humanity?
Why would anyone continue paying him to improve it for the rest of his life? If you hire a contractor to build a bathroom in your mom's basement and he does a shitty job, do you pay him more to fix it conti
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I see you've never worked in the financial services industry, where I've seen people make entire careers out of endlessly tweaking the same piece of legacy software.
Look at hackel's proposal, and his outrage that somebody wants to "make money from their code." Apparently, we should all be working as wage slaves, where no matter HOW GOOD the code is that we write, we get paid for the amount of hours we sat at a desk writing it.
Imagi
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As much as I don't like Apple, your comment seems a little off. First of all, you're admonishing developers for actually wanting to get paid? I hope you realize things like food and housing aren't free. Second of all, Apple's environment never really had a significant open source community of its own. Most of it is just spill over from the regular open source community.
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Revenue != Profit, important lesson there. You need to make sure that you've made more money then you've spent.
If you've marketed a product, it needs to meet a release date. With Apple you cant control things like that, they have obscure rules, bad days and a myriad of other strange reasons why your application can be rejected, if you're going to put money into development, you at leas
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Android app store is 2% of Apple's:
http://larvalab [larvalabs.com]
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Sampling bias? (Score:5, Insightful)
So among cross platform developers, just over half said one platform was better than another.
Talk about sampling bias. This just in, 70% of AppleInsider users think iOS is great, and 99% of lactose intolerant people think Ice Cream suck
big deal.
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It's not so much the horrible things it does to their insides, as the horrible things experienced on the outside.
Like:
Slow elevators.
Rooms with poor ventilation.
Single ply industrial-grade toilet paper.
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So their whole sample for this survey is a small group of users who are *already* using a cross-platform compiler.
Far from newsworthy this is misleading and bogus. Thanks, Slashdot.
Re:Sampling bias? (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly I like Android, and I like iOS, but the GUI layout models are so different, I can't imagine a single system working well for both. Does anyone have experience with it?
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Your basic widgets are pretty straightforward to implement on multiple systems, but what eats up time and effort is indeed things like getting layout to feel like it fits in the system, and to integrate with native widget styles, dialogs, or UI conventions that are different. (Use a system icon there, a menu here; a nav bar at top here, submit/cancel buttons at the bottom there.)
For StatusNet Mobile [status.net] which we buil
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There is also the 6% that chose something else, perhaps blackberry. So it wasn't a choice between two platforms.
"Just over half said one was better than the other" suggests a ratio of something like 51% to 49%. However, it is 59% to 35%, which is pretty significant.
Asking The Undecided? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps I'm missing something, but isn't this effectively a survey of people who are undecided? After all, isn't that why they're using a cross-platform kit rather than writing right to Android/iOS?
I would think looking at the developers who have firmly committed themselves to a platform as a better metric. The uncommitted developers have nothing to lose.
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Ding ding. Give that man a prize!
And more... Not only is this is survey of the folks who have shown themselves to be undecided (surprise! survey says: folks are undecided) but it is also commissioned by other folks who are creating tools for the undecided. Should we be surprised when they present a survey that conforms to their worldview?
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The uncommitted have the opportunity to choose the best option without baggage of prior commitment.
When you are talking about 'long term future' I don't think it is wise to poll people that have committed to a platform previously, you are better off polling people that are betting on the future.
PC Clone Wars Redux (Score:2)
Re:PC Clone Wars Redux (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple obviously never thought of that.
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Right, and that attitude has really killed Apple's computer products.. Oh wait, perhaps not. :)
There is a place for both ideals in this world.
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Perhaps we forget our history, the now defunct Apple Computers?
Apple Inc is making the same mistakes as Apple Computers, Apple Computers made three big mistakes:
1. Made something that was expensive and not any better then its competitors, they called it the Lisa and was built because one man dictated how everything should work.
2. Isolated their core audience, the Lisa got hackers offside, so they switched t
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Perhaps we forget our history, the now defunct Apple Computers? Apple Inc is making the same mistakes as Apple Computers, Apple Computers made three big mistakes: 1. Made something that was expensive and not any better then its competitors, they called it the Lisa and was built because one man dictated how everything should work. 2. Isolated their core audience, the Lisa got hackers offside, so they switched to the new IBM offerings and businesses went with them. 3. Sued Microsoft using a dubious suit when they could not compete. Now Apple Inc made mistake #1 already, they learned from mistake number #2 but picked the wrong audience, the "in" crowd are a fickle bunch which will change their minds as soon as the next big thing(TM) comes along and they've thrown themselves head first into #3 by suing HTC. This last reason says it all, Apple is unable to compete with other manufacturers so they are suing them to prevent anyone else from getting a competitive advantage and ultimately its a losing battle as 1. HTC is Taiwanese and can tell Apple and US laws to sod off (Europe, Asia and China are larger markets then the US) and 2. Apple will have to sue everyone in the end.
I have no idea what you are talking about. 1) There is essentially no competition in the iPod thouch/iPad market. There is the dell streak, which is more expensive than the iPad, and there are a bunch of crappy andriod mp3 players. Nothing else is shipping. The HP Slate looks like a travesty (It has a "ctrl-alt-delete" hardware button!). The Blackberry PlayBook won't be released for a long time, and while it looks pretty good, they don't mention battery life at all. And it has no 3g/etc radio at all.
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So hasn't Slashdot been waiting on iPod Killers for a decade now?
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I don't think your memory is very accurate. I think you are confusing the Lisa with the slightly later Macintosh product line. I don't think Jobs had any hand in the Lisa product.
Were "hackers" ever their "core audience"? Business had long embraced the IBM PC by the time the Mac was available - that market was "lost" during the Apple II days.
Lawsuits are often of little value, but the licensing agreements between Apple and MS were certainly vague over MS's use of various Apple IP and it is certainly was not
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Wikipedia has kind of a different (kinder, to Jobs) view, but also mentions that Steve Jobs was on the Lisa project.
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Apple "mistakes" in the meanwhile has pressured HTC, Dell, Samsung, ... to come up with nice smartphone and tablets, tons better than the crap they were selling with Windows Mobile previously.
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I know you're being facetious, but notice Apple's recent attempt to prevent anyone from developing for iOS with cross-platform middleware or any non-Apple tools.
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The shroud of the android has fallen. Begun, the Clone War has.
translation (Score:2)
translation: where you can even sell an app that does nothing but make fart sounds
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"59% said that Android had the 'best long-term outlook,'"
translation: 59% out of the already poor sample pool have not made a profit on Android market yet. Entrance barrier too low, too much competition between developers, too high customer bargaining power, too much bargaining power from supplier. Every one is still dreaming the pie becomes larger and larger.
Unfortunately... (Score:2)
Unfortunately, it doesn't have anything to do with what developers WANT to do or WHERE they prefer to program, because at the end of the day (for most developers) it all boils down to making some sort of income on the work they do. To do this they have to go where the customers are spending money on their apps and/or where the customers are viewing their ads.
Instead of believing articles like this, I think it's wiser to find a particular niche thats lacking on a mobile device or find something that can be i
It's all about the per user spend up (Score:3, Interesting)
However, this time the OS competing with the Apple camp is *really good* and Android is so far ahead of everything it's not funny. Apple is being forced to eat humble pie and add features that Android pioneered and thus demonstrated Apple was wrong about, it's gotta be a sign.
Oh and the Android development community is fscking awesome.
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I don't see Android's market share plateauing until it is many times that of iOS.
ROFL, because... why? Symbian is hands down the current market leader, and BBOS is no slouch either. Meanwhile, Nokia will be rolling out their next major Symbian rev soon, *and* MeeGo, which means the market's gonna get even more competitive. There's absolutely *no* reason to believe Android will somehow dominate the market, save for mere Google fanboism.
Personally, I look at the way the carriers have fucked Android sans lu
Selection Bias: (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias [wikipedia.org]
Shared libraries are a big key (Score:4, Interesting)
a)You cannot make your own dynamic libraries, only static ones(though the OS obviously supports it, you can include any of Apple's own dyilibs in your project) I don't need to go into why dynamic linking is much better than static....
b)There really isn't a clean way to talk between applications. You can send files, but it's really a drop box, I can COPY(not link!) something into another apps area, but after that the file is no longer mine. So if I want to send something to another app to process and then get it back to do some processing by my application I have to hope the app tells me about the changes, and considering the app may not even know I exist(nor should it, thats the beauty of decoupling), thats a lot to ask.
I can *sort* of understand 1 from a performance standpoint, if you allow user created dynamic libraries every time the application is swapped out of memory you have to find which dynamic libraries it uses, make sure nobody else is using them, then unload them. However as memory increases the rationale behind needing to constantly load/unload them starts to disappear.....
Maybe Apple will change it's tune, but long term I think you will be able to do more interesting things with Android because it allows for the creation of dynamic libraries and inter-application communication.
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b)There really isn't a clean way to talk between applications. You can send files, but it's really a drop box, I can COPY(not link!) something into another apps area, but after that the file is no longer mine. So if I want to send something to another app to process and then get it back to do some processing by my application I have to hope the app tells me about the changes, and considering the app may not even know I exist(nor should it, thats the beauty of decoupling), thats a lot to ask.
Indeed, there's not a great way to share data between apps on iOS; the 'file sharing' in iOS 3.2/4 seems pretty dreadful and awkward to use. You can push some data around via URLs, but I've not been able to find a system for discovering URL handlers, or having a way to declare support for particular types of data instead of manually listing some application-specific URL schemes.
Android's system for "Intents" is a bit nicer; you can combine some typed or structured data (say text/plain) and an action ('sen
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I think with (b) the poster is talking about the totally idiotic way you move files between applications on iOS.
Say I have a text file created in one Application and I want to open it with another to do some formatting then open in again in the original application. On a sane system I'd have some sort of file browser I can use to locate the file. On iOS you have to send a copy to the other application, modify it, hope it knows about the original application so it can send it back, send back another copy of
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If you let tho OS support user built shared libraries then how are you going to *safely* share them between applications?
Do you know what a shared library is and how they work on a unix-like system?
If I develop a poorly written application that allows the shared library to be modified, what happens to the safety and security of the system?
wtf are you on about? So your 'poorly written application' is loading shared library code, modifying it, then persisting it back to the filesystem and your OS is allowing such a thing to happen? I think not.
It would be nice if you would think about why these decisions would-be made, from a technical point, before you make these kinds of statements.
Sounds to me like you have no idea how the system even works yet you're making these ridiculous assertions.
I've said it before and I'll say it again... (Score:2)
Well, I would. (Score:2)
Now, Apple isn't going to disappear in the smartphone space any time soon. It would have to do something in
Shouldn't some of the 100k apple devs be included (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow im shocked, developers that are trying to cater to both and likely started on the android hope android wins. I have no leanings either way, imho they both have their pluses and minuses but if your going to do a survey should people that are actively involved in a platforms development beyond a cross compiler be at least sampled? This reminds me of the AdMob survey back in march that claimed 70% of iPhone developers were jumping ship while surveying only 108 hand picked participants, oddly enough it was the same week that Apple announced it had passed 100,000 licensed developers. I've been dabbling with android itself, but frankly until they can get their act together (3-4 different versions in the wild, poor upgrade paths from oem's, google denying marketplace to non-phone devices) I really don't think Apple has much to worry about. Yes Apple is draconian as hell in their licensing, contracts and at least IMHO rather greedy on the profit sharing but at least there is some organization and direction.
It's Steve Job's MO (Score:2)
I believe it. This is what Steve Jobs does and has always done.
He builds something great then ruins it with his extremely controlling flaky freakout attitude towards the world.
Nothing new here.
not representative (Score:3, Insightful)
This does, of course, suffer from a self-selection bias. People who use a cross-platform compiler have already decided that they want to play in both fields. All this does is find out their reason why. Which is interesting, make no mistake. To round out the picture, however, you'd have to at least get the number of developers who target one platform exclusively or use other cross-platform tools.
With my own dabbling in iPhone development and a friend who does that plus android semi-professionally, my own take is that the iPhone "peak" is getting ever smaller, to get into the top apps that make money like a printing press is getting ever more difficult. However, people usually underestimate the long tail, which feeds quite a lot of developers. It's not as exciting, but it works well especially for small-time and indy developers.
The same goes for android as a whole. I don't see nearly the same exposure for any android apps as is common for top iPhone apps. Less peak, more long tail. There is a marked difference in willingness to pay, however. At this time, as far as I can gather from people I know, android development isn't very profitable. But the growth rate is good, so that may change.
Re:woowoo (Score:5, Insightful)
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The lockdown goes to vendors that can use iOS (1), US telcos that you can use (1), developer programs you can use (1, with variants), approval process for applications (1, draconian), years you can wait for a CDMA phone (divide by 0 error), and of course, the all important under 18 years old experience, meaning bleached and sanitized content (arbitrary, sometimes capricious).
Yet Android has its lockdowns, vendors with dubious business plans, hardware that breaks both in and out of warranty. Couple this to G
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Rejecting apps is only the tip of the iceberg. Objective-c is Apples attempt to co-opt developers. This has backfired. Developers like freedom to own what they make and not be locked into a solution. I can use C,C++ and java on any desktop system really easily. Rejecting apps is all part of Apples attempt to lock you in. Conform or die. Resistance if futile.
Apples attempt to assimilate developers will fail.
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You might've missed the recent repeal of section 3.3.1. Apple now no longer requires applications to be written in Objective-C.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/09/09statement.html [apple.com]
Objective-C never was a developer lock in (Score:5, Insightful)
Objective-c is Apples attempt to co-opt developers
Objective-C never was a developer lock in, it is merely used by the API for the operating system. You have always been free to use C/C++ for your application's code. Whether the OS API is objective-c or C/C++ doesn't really matter, such calls are rarely portable to begin with as they are generally platform or hardware specific.
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In other words, your rant is based entirely on imagination. Please learn some facts before ranting again.
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Objective C is part of the main development environment of OSX. It is the main development language of OSX. OSX is based on NeXT and that used Objective C in the development environment too.
C++ extensions were only added to OSX due to Adobe not wanting to rewrite all their applications. Apple have been trying to kill off the C++ API (Cocoa) for years.
On a mobile device you can't realistically have numerous runtime environments just because developers are lazy. Android only really lets you code in one langua
Re:woowoo (Score:4, Insightful)
Objective-c is Apples attempt to co-opt developers.
Really? I thought Objective-C was Brad Cox's attempt to create a message-passing object-oriented extension to C in the manner of Smalltalk.
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Re:woowoo (Score:4, Interesting)
http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html#overview [android.com]
Just about the only thing you will need to use the DalvikJava for is integration with the app system. Which you want.
Re:woowoo (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize that Apple has paid out over a billion dollars to developers? I always enjoy these off the cuff statemetns about how poorly Apple Developers are treated when the simple fact is, that it is a lucrative market, which is why 3 of 4 still plan to develop for it in the immediate future. (ref: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20007010-260.html [cnet.com])
Assuming they create a good product, they are treated very well, getting an instant distribution model that functions at break even. Not a bad deal at all.
The simple fact is that a huge majority of apps are approved within 2 weeks. Of those that are rejected, almost unilaterally they violated the developer agreement, and then complain about it after the fact. Google Voice was a good example. At the time it was developed, it offered unlimited texting, which duplicated core functionality, which of course is listed in black in white the agreement.
I know it's popular to love to hate Apple lately, but the simple fact is that the majority of apps are rejected because the developer took a chance and ignored the agreement. I will grant that some of these rejections seem a bit stupid.
Given that 95% percent are accepted without any issue at all, leaving only 5% of questionable apps, the argument that Apple is rejecting apps willy nilly is not exactly a good reflection of reality.
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You do realize that Apple has paid out over a billion dollars to developers? I always enjoy these off the cuff statemetns about how poorly Apple Developers are treated when the simple fact is, that it is a lucrative market, which is why 3 of 4 still plan to develop for it in the immediate future. (ref: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20007010-260.html [cnet.com])
Assuming they create a good product, they are treated very well, getting an instant distribution model that functions at break even. Not a bad deal at all.
The simple fact is that a huge majority of apps are approved within 2 weeks. Of those that are rejected, almost unilaterally they violated the developer agreement, and then complain about it after the fact. Google Voice was a good example. At the time it was developed, it offered unlimited texting, which duplicated core functionality, which of course is listed in black in white the agreement.
I know it's popular to love to hate Apple lately, but the simple fact is that the majority of apps are rejected because the developer took a chance and ignored the agreement. I will grant that some of these rejections seem a bit stupid.
Given that 95% percent are accepted without any issue at all, leaving only 5% of questionable apps, the argument that Apple is rejecting apps willy nilly is not exactly a good reflection of reality.
Extremely well said. Sorry to have to watch your comment get modded down by the anti-apple crowd :(
Re:woowoo (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just like those evil retail stores. I hear they buy the product for less than they sell it!
Your figures are off by a factor of 1000 (Score:2)
USERS paid developers over $1 billion, and Apple snatched over $300,000.
iOS developers get 70% of revenue from app sales, Apple gets 30%. 30% of $1 billion is $300 million (not $300,000).
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USERS paid developers over $1 billion, and Apple snatched over $300,000.
Reading comprehension, D-.
It is $1 billion to developers and $429 million to Apple (with a 70/30 split.)
The iOS as a platform for the web and the web app has a larger market share than Linux and five times that of the Android OS. iOS tops Linux [netmarketshare.com]
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USERS paid developers over $1 billion, and Apple snatched over $300,000. Saying Apple has paid $1 billion to developers is like saying VISA has paid companies $1 zillion dollars.
Nice try, Steve Jobs!
No, users paid Apple and then Apple paid the developers. It's fundamental to how the App Store works.
Your post is like saying you directly paid MS for the Xbox 360 you bought at Fry's.
Re:woowoo (Score:4, Informative)
It is clear that the $1B is referring to the money users paid for the apps. Apple says that they paid it b/c it is given to Apple and then immediately forwarded to the developers.
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So exactly which part of the big slide in the background that says "$1 Billion paid to developers!!!!" don't you understand? Nowhere on the slide is there a little asterisk that says (after Apple takes it's 30% cut).
It's only five words and $1 in the whole sentence. I didn't post a third party interpretation. I posted a picture
Re:woowoo (Score:4, Insightful)
It's obvious you can read and count from your user name, but do you understand logic?
"Apple has paid $1 billion to developers." - is a half truth. That's maybe why the editor of the article put in the full sentence:
"And Apple has paid out over $1 billion to app developers (their 70% cut fo all sales)." (spelling error preserved so you could get a hardon)
Apple didn't 'pay $1 billion to developers' cause they're such nice guys. They did so because that's what the developers had coming to them. To put it in the context that they did it for any other reason is faulty and/or misleading logic.
is 100% correct so don't get your panties in a bunch.
Re: (Score:2)
Thats like getting a nice home in East Germany and a non Trabant car.
You still have no freedom to code or install a better OS. People dont "hate Apple" they are just aware Google, MS, Apple ect are building some very thick and high walls around mobile computing.
Why should we not get the same freedoms we enjoy on most desktops?
Re:woowoo (Score:4, Interesting)
Then look at the statistics quoted:
Long Term: 59% Android, 35% Apple, and 6% other (undecided, supports both, or neither)
Short Term: 76% Apple
I hardly call that "betting big" on Android. Personally I'll "bet big" that Apple gradually relaxes out of its "walled garden" approach, Google will drift toward higher standards for its market place apps... and ultimately whoever designs (or supports) the shiniest phones will win. Slashdotter's sometimes forget, hardware aesthetics often are the deciding factor.
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Sure it's a decent number of apps given that there is something like a quater of a million apps, but its a small percent of the whole. These are also folks that broke the rules, not some innocent victim. Yes there are rare cases where an app is rejected for stupid reasons, but those reasons were spelled out in the dev agreement.
The sense of entitlement of some people these days is amazing. They agreed to the develop
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Those dick moves like randomly rejecting applications and stealing functionality out of apps for the base system isn't really endearing them with the people they need to keep the appstore vibrant.
devs care about where the money is. apple wins if they can keep their app market more lucrative, regardless of what devs say they plan to do in the future.
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speculation is shit. who cares...
They can speculate all they want. Meanwhile, Apple will probably expand their WWDC to > 10k developers and they'll still speculate that the majority of devs are betting on Android.
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speculation is shit. who cares...
True. This is a survey of developers who are already using a cross-platform development tool. How about they take the same survey of developers who are using XCode - are they considering Android as the better long term bet? What percentage of iOS developers are using cross-platform tools?
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You're off by a little.
More like 8 percent. [maclife.com]
When you consider that there are hundreds of OEMs, 8 percent of the market is a big hairy deal.
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Apple was as high as +20% of the computer market back in the 1980s.
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Right, highly profitable markets, with the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the industry. It's just how Apple's markets work!
I know you're trolling, but you realize that owning a huge percentage of a market while barely being able to make a profit is a problem... right? I'm looking at you, Nokia.
I wish I had a business that was as irrelevant and unsuccessful as Apple's.
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35% of mobile application developers are FUCKING RETARDS.
Did your survey determine which 35%?
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For developers it does, sorta, since you have to have a Mac to develop. Which a lot of people don't.
Of course it's still peanuts, and only matters for small developers with 1-2 simple apps.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> If you have brand x phone and I have brand y and you have a cool app, will it really work on my phone with a different processor,
> screen geometry, camera, sensors, etc?
Basically, yes. For the same reason you can run the same Windows and Linux software regardless of whether your x86 CPU was made by AMD or Intel, and use 3D graphics regardless of whether the video chipset was made by AMD, nVidia, or Intel. Strictly speaking, native code compiled for ARM won't work on an x86-architecture device runnin