Why I'm investing in Windows Phone and skipping Android | Hacker News Reader

Why I'm investing in Windows Phone and skipping Android

blog.cubeofm.com

24 pointsslig51 comments

This blog post is sooo bad and uninformed, it's hard to believe he is making money with mobile software.

So, to his points:

Google does not care about me. Google does not give me any mode of getting in contact with them. With both Apple and Microsoft, I have access to their developers

Mh, what? Freenode irc channels, google code open issue trackers? a LOT of forums and blogposts to learn from? Official "support" on stackoverflow and mailinglists? Last time i checked finding iPhone dev information was rather hard due to NDA stuff (i was told that this is changing/has changed). To find people to talk to (even from google) is really not hard. Apparently the blog poster didn't even try the least bit.

Google does not seem to want anyone to make money on their platform. They just put their platform out there, and say : do what you want with it. There is no attempt to actually make people make money

What does this mean?! Put it in the android market, get paid with google checkout or put ads in your app with admob. "They just put it out there" is exactly the nice thing, especially for a developer. You can take a look at the whole source, you have everything you need!

Android as a user device is horrible. It's jerky, slow you have random flashes, and it's totally uninnovative compared to the iPhone. There is absolutely nothing new there.

"Totally uninnovative"? What? The first phones (i owned the G1) were rather slow due to slow hardware, sure. Current Hardware (Droid & Nexus One) is fast and responsive, no doubt about that. I'd rate the Nexus One on par with the iphone (and most iPhone users i have met agree).

All in all, the blog post starts with heavy trolling... and i shouldn't even respond to that.. :/

> Current Hardware (Droid & Nexus One) is fast and responsive, no doubt about that.

I have a variety of current generation smart phones sat on my desk. I can assure you Android is still the least responsive OS :)

My personal choice is an iPhone and I dont agree. :)

> Last time i checked finding iPhone dev information was rather hard due to NDA stuff

Just as a point I think max was talking about getting in touch with developers at Apple, Google and Microsoft. Not just getting in touch with other developers on the platforms. (Google are people notoriously hard to get hold of at times :D So I am guessing that's what he means). Though I make no comment on if he is right or not.

Then you probably have another smartphone then i have. Just yesterday i was meeting friends (4xiPhones, 1xMilestone/Droid, 1xNexusOne) and the good nerds we were, people wanted to check out the newer Android phones. The 4 iPhone guys agreed it's on par.

You probably notice responsiveness differences beyond the level a normal person recognizes :p In fact, when you say you have a variety of smartphones on your desk, i guess you are working on a daily base with different handsets and have a very keen sense for this. And as i don't have numbers to back my statement up i'd say it's a difference in those handsets 95% of users wouldn't recognize. ;)

Well I work with them in the sense they are test beds for our phone forensics work.

But in fairness I have used pretty much all of them for extended periods as my work or social phone. Still going with the iPhone as the cleanest user experience :)

(but I realize opinions differ widely)

We know the N1 is not an iPhone. It is a very good phone for people who don't want iPhones, though.

Maybe people really only care about superficial looks, but then I don't know why all mobile phone makers except Apple just close shop.

I personally prefer the design of the N1, but that might be the geek in me. I get a sort of "eeew" feeling from most Apple products that is hard to explain, because it is too much design for me. Comparable maybe to seeing a prostitute in latex trousers and everything - yes, it looks good, but I still don't want it. But that is just my taste. The masses will decide, and the spare change in their pockets, too.

Actually I quite like (possibly even prefer) the Android design.

My issues have always been with:

- responsiveness (even the latest Android phones aren't speedy enough for me)

- phone - in my mind the iPhone is by far the best pure phone (and text message/email/web browser). There are little innovations and usability tweaks that make it my favourite phone.

seeing a prostitute in latex trousers and everything - yes, it looks good

Sounds horrid to me :s

All that support stuff is great for hobbyists, but completely unacceptable for businesses. With Apple and Microsoft you get incident support. If something comes up, you email them your project, they dig into the source, and they tell you what's going on at the code level. The iPhone Developer Program gives you two code-level incident supports, and the ones after that are absurdly cheap. Microsoft also gives you a phone option.

This is how real business support works, not forums and mailing lists. The latter is cool, but you also need the latter to have a serious platform.

Yeah, we have all heard the stories about the great support iPhone developers get, if their app is rejected for the app store.

If that is professional business, I prefer to stay independent. Actually, all the pain just might be a deliberate barrier to entry for "small fish". Companies are used to dealing with pain, individuals less so.

As a professional iPhone developer with a multiple top ranking apps, that shit just doesn't really happen anymore. You're much more likely to get a call from Apple with suggestions on what to edit.

The horror stories are from 6-9 months ago, and are outdated. So, while folks trot them out in threads like this as examples of how terrible iPhone development is, actual iPhone developers know that it doesn't really come up.

Our last two updates were accepted within 24 hours, for instance. Our last new application took three submits, due to issues on our end- every email from them was helpful, and actually IMPROVED the final application. Turnaround was 48 hours, and, on the last submission, they expedited to same-day when I asked them to.

I have an app (nowhere near top ranking tho) and I agree with you for the most part. My first submission took 2 days and any updates have taken less than 24 hours. One took less than 6 hours for them to turn it around and get it on the app store.

My only issue with the app store now is the returns. I have had 1 return and all I got from Apple was the form letter that if you have a lot of returns it might be a quality issue. What I would like to see is at least the questionnaire the customer fills out in order for Apple to grant the return. At least this way I can know if it's some sort of serious problem or just someone who made a purchase by mistake.

I appreciate the benefits of incident support.... but tbh i've never hit a use case where i've needed it. Most issues you can work through yourself and if there is a serious fundamental flaw in the base code you can always find people in the right places to report it to.

With my experience with working with Windows Mobile: EXPECT NO SUPPORT. Most of the problems are due to the OEMs and some of the major ones I worked with (Symbol, Intermec, Datalogic) had support that was hilariously bad / non existent.

Of course you need apple and ms internal developers to dig into their source code, because you as a developer can't.

On the other hand, i can debug through every aspect of my android program right into the whole framework and see what is happening. Yay, open source.

Interesting but risky point. What if the new Windows Mobile flops due to critical problems much like the other Windows Mobiles?

Android at least is already gathering momentum, despite all its issues. It's nice that Microsoft cares, but you won't get rich selling to the 3 people who decided to buy a Microsoft phone.

You say "They care about how polished the outside looks, how thin it is, and how smooth and fast the user interface is."

People also care about how easy it is to do whatever they're trying to do. And this combination, smooth, fast, and easy, is really hard to achieve. I'm not entirely convinced Microsoft is still up to it, though I'll be glad to be surprised.

I think Microsoft may stand an outside chance; they are already going in the right direction with recent UI/UX changes in Windows. They've always got that it should be slick but usable; their major problems (in the past) have been in realizing that slick on a desktop != slick on a phone...

The most serious problem with previous versions of Windows Mobile isn't the myriad UI issues (which are collectively definitely a close second), it's the stability of the core OS. Every last person I know who has owned a WinMo phone (which is admittedly still not very many people, so sample size warning!) has complained about how frequently they have to reboot their phone. This is particularly egregious when the phone crashes as it sits idly in your pocket, causing you to miss incoming calls until you take out your phone and realize what has happened.

In order for Windows Phone 7 to succeed where Windows Mobile failed, they need to revamp the internals of the OS just as drastically as they have revamped their UI. It's definitely possible that they have done it; clearly Microsoft cares a lot about this release and clearly some major parts of the underlying OS are changing. But I personally would not bet months of development time on it until someone outside MS gets the chance to use the phones in a non-demo environment.

Obviously, it's risky. Given the information that is available at the moment (screenshots, videos, spec sheets), then this particular path is the best to take. I.e, Microsoft can still fuck it up by release a sideways talker or something stupid like that. But I cannot know this at this point in time, and the risk is basically in deciding that if they got this far and were able to come up with something new, then they will also make the final parts of this good.

One thing that worries me a bit is the 0.8 second delay when you switch screens. This may make the phone feel slow, and if it slows down over time, then that can kill the phone. But I can't know this now, one just has to take a risk.

I'm not sure if their mobile brand is recoverable. Everyone knows that Windows Mobiles suck and have sucked for the past ten or so years. There are only a handful of solid and decent implementations of WinMo (X1 and X2 were pretty good IIRC) the rest just resulted in consumers having a negative mobile experience.

I don't know the numbers of "tainted" Win Mo consumers but I'm not convinced they will really appreciate the differences between their old "piece of shit" WinMo and the new shiny (and hopefully freaking awesome) WinMo 7.

As an Android user for the past several months there is not a single app that would compel me to stay on the platform.

I've been patiently waiting for the Android Market to start filling up with polished apps, fun games, and tools to help me at work. Unfortunately, I'm several months in and the best-selling games are Bejeweled knock-offs, and a $3.99 version of Doodle Jump. I didn't make my choice of phone platform based upon game selection, but it definitely seems that iPhone developers are focused on building businesses and making money, while Android developers are mainly hobbyists, tinkering on niche projects.

To the author's point, if the existing .NET development community can leap-frog Android in terms of app output and app quality, then they would make a believer out of me.

YES.

I agree there are not many nice games. Didn't miss many other things, but I am not much of an app collector.

However, the lack of quality apps is motivating me as a developer. How am I supposed to compete on the iPhone, if there are a gazillion apps that are polished bordering on cheesiness? Seems to me on Android there are more opportunities for me.

  Microsoft has seen what Apple and others have done,
  and have made something along the same line,
  but daring and new.

Daring and new is fine, but in this case daring and new is not enought, it must be useable too. Too many copycats failed for the very simple reason: copying the superficial aspects and having no idea about the essence why the things they copy work in the first place.

  Microsoft is investing in the right type of
  future oriented technologies

I'd say that one of the killer apps for iPhone is Mobile Safari. Why one cannot argue about MS effort, sorry, but anything they can put on the device won't stand a chance compared to WebKit browsers.

  Microsoft has a huge marketing and development budget
  to push anything they want

That may be the problem, not a solution. Thinking that marketing can fix a bad product, or thinking that innovation is proportional to money thrown on the problem. Usually it is the other way around: restrictions sprak innovation.

  Microsoft has integrated its programming languages across all platforms,
  implying a huge number of devs will program for their platforms

This is two sided also. Brought back memories of Win shareware.

He makes a really good argument. I agree with most of his points, especially this:

Technology people tend to vastly overestimate the things that people look at when deciding if a phone is good or not. They care about how polished the outside looks, how thin it is, and how smooth and fast the user interface is. There is really not much more! They don't care about multi-tasking or open source or any of that stuff - they care about how impressed other people are when they look at them using the phone.

I started with a MyTouch and moved to a Nexus One (which I have now). The more I use Android, the less appealing it becomes. Honestly... who cares that it's open source? It's a novelty. The AOSP stuff for 2.1 has been out forever, yet the only device to be using it is the Nexus. The fragmentation is killing it. I think a lot of Apple's success with the iPhone comes from a lot of it's restraints.

In the long run I still think Apple is always going to have the upper hand.. not only because it was first in this new generation of smartphones, but because they control every aspect of the device. OS, Hardware, Applications and App Store.

I wasn't even considering the Windows phone... but now it's definitely in the back of my mind.

I want to like the new Windows Phone interface, but I hate it. I want to like it because I want there to be competition to the iPhone and Android is so... crummy. Android phones are still unresponsive, clunky, unpolished and just... bad.

Take a look at the Engadged video Max links to. There's no way easy way to navigate through the Windows Phone. Animations everywhere that take seconds. Did you notice that opening the address book took 5 seconds? I sure did. Everything is moving and shifting permanently -- so you'll get nauseous if you put it on your desk. The web browser? Checkerboard all the way through the moment you start scrolling, and you can't even zoom in and out before the page has loaded. And the responsiveness was bad too. Tap on a caption. Wait two seconds. Tap again. Wait. See animation. Scroll. Urgh.

Note the guy didn't mention anything about 3rd party software. Where are those apps going to end up? Will you be able to install/uninstall easily? And so on.

I think it's going to flop.

Completely agree that nerd appeal matters not one bit to end-users. But while yes, they pay attention to the polish, what they are really after is being cool. And no cool person I know is going to get caught carrying Microsoft around while there are iPhones in the world. The Droid is show-off-worthy and cool too. Microsoft has a steep climb out of its uncool-ness, and I for one, would not bank on it. But I've been wrong before.

Found it interesting how Android is dissed as something that appeals only to nerds, which in my mind I kept equating with "developers" and the reasoning this is bad, while Microsoft's strategy is good is that they focus on developers, developers, developers.

I like how Max likes being the contrarian, much ala Giles Bowkett, and get tons of traffic and us commenting on his articles. He's output a good number just this year and about all of these have made it into HN's home page. He knows how to get nerds talking, that's for sure.

Man, got carried away talking about cool that forgot about my other thought. Any iPhone-competing device will need manufacturers and the carriers to push it. Android has that going already. Surely Microsoft will get plenty phones out there in time, but will it be soon enough and at a competitive price point? we'll see I guess.

The blogpost seems a bit too praising towards Microsoft for my taste. But there is one bullet point missing there:

* Microsoft guys are desperate they will lose the mobile market for iPhone on the upper-end and Android on the lower-end so they will throw as much money at the problem to get into the spotlights again.

Of course this won't help them much since all the 3 companies involved (Apple, Google and Microsoft) have tons of cash.

The rest of the arguments are also debatable.

I think he has a point in that I pretty much have the impression that windows phone and iphone users will be more likely to spend a dime on something, as compared to android users I know :)

I think that the Windows Phone market (>30 crowd) are a great market. They have money, small amounts don't matter to them, they are not so jaded and have not already seen everything on reddit. They also are not aware that they can do a lot of the things they buy for free on some website.

That's the problem with Android - it targets the nerd market, which is the worst market to sell software to.

> They also are not aware that they can do a lot of the things they buy for free on some website.

Or alternatively (in my case) they know a free alternative exist, but they are ok to pay on a paid version if it saves them some time to be spent with their friends, kids, hobbies or sideprojects.

Hmm, the economical success of the iphone apps was always linked to the high number of pre-existing itunes accounts. Said that, android and w7 phones looks the same from the app dev point of view. In my opinion, currently the problem with android users is that they are still more "educated" than their iphone counterpart and less prone to spend money on one of the multitude of the copycat/not-polished/useless apps the the average iphone user throw money at. And we could also discuss about the maturity of the android market offer as a whole... Still hard to find application comparable to the iphone best ones (see games).

Apple won this round because they already had access to people's pocketbooks through existing iTunes users.

It will take years (5?) for any other company to build up a marketplace like iTunes. Honestly, Amazon or eBay could out-compete Google or Microsoft in this area right now, because they have regular paying customers. Hell, Amazon already has some experience with mobile devices (Kindle).

The downside of Windows Phone 7 is that it is the most limiting and sandboxed development platform of all mobile operating systems. No native code execution like Android, no multitasking, no direct access to the camera, no sockets support and more. Even Silverlight has less restrictions.

no sockets support? sounds like a dealbreaker. does it have something similar to take up the slack, like a web access framework or something?

Only HTTP is supported unlike Silverlight which also supports TCP sockets and even multicast UDP with Silverlight 4.

Android has native code execution via the NDK:

http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html

My mistake, i meant to write "No native code execution support like Android has".

This trend is for real, I know people who preferred Windows Mobile to iphone recently.

Was he paid by MS to write that (Microsoft cares that he makes money - in more then one way)?

If this were about Apple, I don't think anyone would even think that the person were being paid. No, Microsoft did not pay me, just the same as Google did not way me to write my article about Google Wave.

It's just that it sounded very one-sided in a very weird way. For example pointing to the countless .NET developers. There are countless Java developers, too. Same with the "they'll throw money at it to make it successful" - so will Apple and Google.

Many of the other points are mostly a matter of taste, I suppose.

Why does Microsoft care that you earn money?

Good luck with Windows Mobile!

Edit: I just remembered another thing - smart people can rationalize everything. Maybe you are just trying to rationalize your decision for yourself, that is why it sounds a bit weird to the outside.

Obviously, deluding myself into believing what I want to believe is a big problem that we all face. But I'm well aware of this, and I've factored it in into my decision. I'm here for the money, not for any misguided loyalty to open or free software or any company. It appears to me that Microsoft is going to do the right thing. It has the prerequisites for this.

Thinly veiled advertisement from microsoft?

Max Klein (author of this blog) is a regular HN member with some 5000 karma and many insightful comments.

Thinly veiled advertisement from maxklein?

(sorry couldn't resist :))

I funnelled some of the cash I received from Microsoft to swombat. Win, win situation.

Still, after reading his post I can't get Ballmer's sweaty "developers" chant out of my head.

Astroturfing

I don't know about the article, but if I click on another HN article and end up on a page with Posterous trying to get me to sign up? I'm going to go running screaming into the night.

A few times was okay, guys. I get it. Everybody has to advertise. After about 10 or 20, if I haven't signed-up, I'm not going to.

Screenshot? If posterous is intruding on the reading experience of my users I'm going to change it.

Just tried it again from FF and got it. Trying it a second time from Chrome did not bring up the error.

I'll email you the image.

It says it can't find the link, and I get sent to the posterous splash page.

Interestingly enough, it looks like every other page request I send to posterous today from this browser will be honored. But if I switch to a new browser and go to click on a blog that's hosted on posterous, back I go to their "can't find the link and wouldn't you like to start using our service!" page.

Perhaps it's just a bug. But it's a bug that acts exactly like somebody continuously trying to get me to start using something I do not want to use. So whether it's intentional or not, it's annoying as hell.

As a follow, in case any of the posterous guys are listening, Max and I played around a bit and could not replicate the error.

My current guess -- it's not my problem so all I have is a guess -- is that under heavy load, posterous fails to resolve the blog name and instead takes new users to the splash page. This may be a scaling problem, or it could be random pestering. From a user's standpoint, it looks a lot like pestering.

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