Hacker News Reader

Comment by __sr__ | Hacker News Reader

Good riddance! It’s not like they have actively been developing Android to support tablets. In fact, it is the other way around. The older versions had better support for tablets. Even Nexus 9 was a half hearted attempt at best — and the rest is history. Google’s lack of interest in nowhere more evident than their own apps — many of them were just scaled versions of phone apps. And if Google is not bothering to optimise their apps for tablets, what motivation do third party developers have?

Strictly speaking, Android tablets never even competed in the same arena as the iPad. Samsung is an exception, but they don’t control the ecosystem — which makes things much harder for them — even if we ignore their atrocious software.

View on HN

In a lot of cases a scaled (or just small) phone app is good enough. But... overall.. I think the tablet category is just not a very big one. I had an iPad and an old 7" nexus. When they died, I didn't replace.

Phones got bigger and better. We got better at thumb typing and comfortable holding screens close. Reading on a tablet for example, is not that different to a phone these days and a (cheap) dedicated reader is better still. Meanwhile, laptops kept getting more mobile. The space between my phone and my laptop is just not that big. I found that I only ever charged it before flights, for movies which is great on tablets. But even that.. laptops and phones work good too.

Otherwise, my tablets were often battery-dead and I most tablets i come across in friends living rooms are dead. They don't get much use. When a laptop or phone died, I need a new one tomorrow. The tablet... no urgency.

Tablets are fun and cool. People like them. I'm not sure they use them as much as they expected to. It's a less extreme version of smart watches. Fun. Likeable. Not essential for most people.

The problem is that the android and iOS monoliths (especially sofwarists) will always put the phones first. If we had a less centralised ecosystem, tablets would have their own specialists.

I guess that varies from person to person. My iPad Pro, for example, is my most used personal device. I prefer it over my phone whenever possible. In fact, I like phones small - it’s a pain to pull out a brick every time I want to talk.

It’s a matter of personal taste, I guess.

>It’s a matter of personal taste, I guess.

Of course it is, but tablet sales have been declining for years.

Is it because of the lack of interest or is it because people aren't replacing them because they are still working for them? I haven't lost interest in tablets but I also haven't bought one in four years because mine suits my needs.

I never buy a tablet because none of them are competitive enough. I usually have better specs on the phone in my pocket than tablets I usually see. I never understood why Android tablets did not get more competitive.

It certainly doesn't seem so for Android. The last Android tablet I bought was the Nexus 7 in 2013. Still use it from time-to-time.

163.5M is still a significant number of sales per year though. I don't think it's a dying segment yet. Interestingly detachable tablet sales have increased for the past few years.

Source: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS43549518

I’d say tablet sales are approaching their stable values.

iPad sales peaked a few years ago, but they still represent a good chunk of Apple’s revenue.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/269915/global-apple-ipad...

https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/01/2q-2018-results/

It’s more like cell phones have created unreasonable expectations for sales. People change phones once ever 12-24 months. Tablets, on the other hand, easily last 3-4 years. In that sense, tables have more in common with laptops than phones. People who need them, buy them all the time. It is just that not as many people need tablets as phones. Initially a lot of tables were sold because of the hype. But then people realised that not everyone needs a tablets — and theat tablets can be shared among the family — unlike phones. Hence the so called “decline”.

I like to think that tablet sales are reaching their stable values rahpther than just declining.

Do people stilll talk on phones?

Serious question. I think I do about 99% of my communication via text or other messaging

I guess it depends on the demographics.

But one thing that annoys me is that people don’t usually realize how much faster and clearer voice conversation can be.

After 4 or 5 rapid text exchanges I usually send “can I call you?”

I see this question asked a lot on almost all tech-centric places on the 'net. I think it's a decent example of the "thought bubble" that happens in tech circles both online and off. Where is it that these people asking the question actually _go_ - in real life - that they don't see many people talking via voice on their phones? I ask because almost everywhere I go or practically have ever gone since cell phones became ubiquitous, up to and including this very morning, I come across multiple instances of people talking on their phones.

Definitely. Text is good for “lazy” communication — so is email. By lazy, I mean, I sent you a text and you can respond whenever you like. But if the communication is real time - i.e. the sender expects a quick response and vice versa, voice call is usually better. In fact, unless I know the person very well, I usually send a text asking if it is a good time to talk.

They do when driving.

Nah I love my iPad Pro 10.5

Yes. But I think the gist of the point is you're in the fringe, the minority.

I meant it even more delicately than that. I think (a) more people thought they would be in his boat than were, just because tablets are fun and likeable and (b) as phones/laptops got bigger/smaller, and improved faster.... There is a little less need for tablets now than 5 years ago.

That's why (I think) they will get less investment, like this article.

I’ve owned every other generation iPad since launch. The iPad Pro 10.5 is something special. Keyboard cover, screen size, split view, effortless portability... they add up in a way that has significantly changed how I use it. I rarely use my MBP away from my desk anymore. Aside from work requiring Xcode, Smart Keyboard cover + ssh client + tmux works surprisingly well (for me) for away-from-desk dev work.

I have the same tablet and the same experience. If they stopped making the iPad Pro, or something like it, I would be very much affected, because I do a great deal of real-world work on it, in places that would be much less hospitable to even small laptops.

I, too, do ssh + tmux, as well as Textastic, Pythonista, and Working Copy (git), so much so that when I showed a colleague what I did, he exclaimed in an astonished tone that the only things he thought people used iPads for were email, browsing, and games.

That remark prompted me to make an 11 minute video (all done on the iPad using screen recording, Keynote, and iMovie) of creating a Linode, sshing into it, installing a user with SSH login, logging out and sshing in as the new user, installing the latest Docker from docker.com, and demoing some of the apps I just mentioned (to fit a 15 minute time budget). The latest iPads are not toys; they can be used for professional work.

With LTE access, I can easily work almost anywhere; working on a plane is much easier than with a laptop (for me - I'm pretty tall and it's already a squeeze).

Would you mind posting the video? That sounds great.

I don't think that's true; tablets are everywhere among the non-tech circles. They are mostly some iteration of iPad, however.

My nephews are constantly on their iPads playing games or watching YouTube.

Lost a ton of pictures on a Nexus 7, any idea if the battery is replaceable? Charging does nothing...

I'll be honest, I look at my phone like I do an iPad these days - I find the same reasons I don't like a classic tablet is the same reasons I don't like my phone much anymore. Apps suck, I'd prefer mobile web and if I have to do anything that requires brainpower then I always reach for my MacBook or my surface pro.

Chromeos with android is a lot more useful because you have full blown desktop chrome with chrome developer tools. The new chromeos devices have convertable touch screens and basically can function as tablets. But I own the new ipad because I don't have an iphone but still want my hands on these amazing Moog ios apps for my music. Android native is terrible for music, chrome browser itself has a much more highly developed api with webmidi and webaudio than you have with native android with its java based midi library.

Anyone serious about audio on Android needs to use the NDK APIs with OpenSL or the new AAudio, everything else is just pain.

Most Android devices aren't capable of truly low-latency audio (sub-10ms round-trip). This makes the total addressable market for pro audio apps very small, which means device manufacturers have little incentive to spend the engineering resources to provide low latency, which makes the total addressable market for pro audio apps very small.

Unless Google start setting audio latency requirements, it's a lost cause.

http://superpowered.com/latency

It's a real shame for bedroom producers like me, I've got a disposable income but not a spare grand for an iPad pro (plus I'm an apple anti-fan :-D ).

If Google had sorted out the audio story earlier, you might still have had problems with commodity tablets, but it might have been worth somebody's while to make a tablet specifically for audio and midi. It wouldn't be a million miles away from Maschine or something like that. But I fear the opportunity's gone now, and Android tablets are just a write off.

I still have my Nexus 7 which I basically use as a Kindle.

Those requirements do exist, but only for Android 8 devices, which aren't that many.

Otherwise only Samsung devices are usable, with their own real time audio SDK.

I admit that I haven't paid much attention. But the whole revamp of the UI framework into Fragments was precisely to let app developers support both phones and tablets.

Why do you say older versions of Android had better support for tablets?

Lots of Android system UI and first party apps had better tablet interfaces in ICS than they do in Nougat or Oreo.

This is a bit of a stretch. There was a lot of work done on improving tablet support in K, L and M, including work to specifically support the Nexus 9 and Pixel C. There was also the addition of multi-window, etc.

It has nothing to do with APIs.

Our app has a great tablet version, on par with iPad and we don’t use fragments at all. We just change things based on size.

It’s more that Google obviously stopped caring about tablets many major versions ago.

For what it's worth, there are Android tablet users out there like me that really appreciate the work you put into making the experience great :-)

See but that doesn't answer my question: What makes you think that they stopped caring about tablets?

Fragments were way over engineered. Many people completely ignored them because you basically had to rewrite a significant portion of your app to support the type of flexibility they were supposed to give you. The lifecycle of apps is already complicated enough, and fragments added even more complexity. Like another poster mentions, completely ignoring fragments is a pretty reasonable choice.

It was around the time I started playing with fragments that I realized that the native Java android toolkit was a giant pile of crap.

Android, I think, is not even supposed to be a well-engineered system. It is not central to its purpose. Its purpose is to eat marketshare, collect data, and ensure there is an outlet for ads. It only has to work well enough to do those things :)

I get the sense that it was all slapped together as quickly as possible.

Well, yeah, that's the goal of everything commercial. Being well-engineered is a means, not an end.

Nah, tons of companies are incredibly passionate about quality in itself. Sometimes to a fault!

iOS and UWP are both commercial and the quality of their tooling and OS frameworks runs circles around Android's.

Sadly it is hard to win over free beer.

I got the same impression, it's just filled with hacks to get proper behavior and don't get me started on the support libraries, oof how I hate those.

> I get the sense that it was all slapped together as quickly as possible.

It was, historically. Android was a startup that had to get to market as fast as they could. To make matters worse, once the iPhone came out they had to quickly switch from a Treo-like interface to a iOS-like one in order to stay relevant.

To Google's credit, they've been trying for years to clean it up, but there's only so much they can do…

Sorry just got stuck and smiled over your first sentence "Fragments were way over engineered." and couldn't restrain myself of thinking about all Googlers that passed the whiteboard tests

True I don't think I have ever had an interview question that questioned my ability to keep simple. I think this is where experience comes in valuable, the ability to "keep things as simple as possible and no simpler".

I find the best approach to KISS is to write it as simple as possible under the assumption you'll have to throw it away. If it turns out you don't have to (after measuring), then all the better.

I host interviews for Google. A simpler design that solves a problem is definitely valued better than an unnecessarily-complicated one.

Keep in mind that Fragments happened while Rubin was still nominally in control of Android.

Once the civil war between him and Pichai had a clear winner (after all, for a while both ChromeOS and Android were poised to push into the same market), the tablet elements were depreciated rapidly as as Duarte was free to assert more control.

Maybe it is just me but Android got gradually worse over time, bloated with useless features that are the first thing that I turn off on my new devices usually. It is still impossible to find certain basic functionality in the setup, which drives my nuts every single time I have to find them. It would be worth to visualise how much effort is to turn off spell correction on different mobile devices and use change other basic parameters and compare it to iOS.

On my android phone (Nokia 3, fwiw) that example is trivial: pull down menu, settings, search "spell", "spell checker", "off".

Yup, exact same on my S7.

Spell checker setting did not appear on my S8.

I remember when settings search actually worked. Now a lot is hidden in Google Play Services settings and can't be found.

I agree. 1st table I ever owned was a Nexus 7. I bought it because I was very satisfied with Nexus 5 being my phone (price and stability).

The thing that annoyed me the most about Nexus 7 apart from lacking on basic things was its sound... I'd go in an airplane and I wouldn't be able to hear anything. After that I never bought a Nexus product again, and tbh I don't feel left out of anything.

> basic things was its sound... I'd go in an airplane and I wouldn't be able to hear anything.

Was the sound issue also present when you were using headphones?

A bit of topic: Because it inconsiderate to use speakers in a airplane. Last airline I used warn passengers to not use speakers.

Sorry, I didn't specify it. Yes that was using headphones... who would use speakers on an airplane.

You weren't using headphones on a plane? You know other people don't want to hear your movie, right?

I was using headphones, just forgot to specify it... why you so mad?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com