I can just leave a new phone next to the router. With windows, I have to sit and monitor a lot of things for those four hours along with hunting down the most updated executables and setup files.
I feel that mobile got software distribution correct. Thanks a ton, Scott Forstall.
To me, part of what makes PCs "Personal Computers" is that I don't need to go through some third party to distribute or acquire software. I don't need anyone's blessing, and I don't need to jump through hoops rooting the device or compiling from source, I just do it because it's my computer.
If all Windows applications were PortableApps, all you'd have to do when getting a new computer is copy over the directories where your applications are stored. Installs are a copy, uninstalls are a delete.
Then you'd have to spend your time waiting for the author of your walled-garden app to fix the problem or spend your time finding a different app to use and then spend more time transitioning to it.
In any case, I think that the trade-off needs to be acknowledged for what it is. You're trading your freedom for convenience. Of course this is the American way, what with all the overflowing amounts of freedom that we have.
Most people don't think "Oh man I love Instagram v50.1.2",they just use Instagram.
It's the same thing with the OS. There are always tons of complaints after a new release of iOS.
> ...I'll just use another one.
Yep. And you'll spend your time looking for another one and then you'll spend more time transitioning over to it.
> Most people don't think "Oh man I love Instagram v50.1.2",they just use Instagram.
Nope. Instead they think - "Oh man, Instagram sucks after that last update, but what can I do about it??" and then they give up.
If I really really hate an update, I don't spend more than a minute transitioning. I just look at the "Apps like this tab". Another feature that is not there natively in Windows/Linux and requires third parties to make subpar lists.
If new software was really so terrible, people would be abandoning apps, not complaining about them which is what happened with Linux and to a lesser extent, Windows.
Yes they are. The definition of empirical is that you can observe the evidence. This is easily observable.
What have you presented besides your own anecdotes?
> "Apps like this" on Windows/Linux
It's called Google. The same thing I use to find iOS apps because Apples app store search and recommendations are horrible. None of the app store searches are really any good and I'm pretty sure Google is the number one place that people usually search for things. I don't know anybody who opens up their app store to search for an app.
Anyway, argue all you want - you're wrong. People care about updates that mess up their stuff whether you can bring yourself to acknowledge that or not.
The total reviews will be less than ten percent of the installs. The negative reviews are a fraction of that percentage.
As such you cannot observe via reviews what the majority of the users think of the app.
Then, by the definition you have just given, app reviews aren't empirical.
Sorry, but none of your badly formed, hand-wavy reasoning has proven that wrong. Also, nobody is arguing that "the majority" think something - I'm arguing against your completely anecdotal and un-evidenced claim that it "rarely" happens.
What evidence do you have that it rarely happens? None that I can see so far...
It's like surveying a small percentage of an electorate by asking them who they'll vote for for and deciding the result based on the survey.
Anyway, once again... where is your evidence that this rarely happens?
My evidence can drawn from the fact that ten percent of people write reviews. A fraction of that are negative. If an occurrence happens say five out of a hundred times,that's a rare occurrence.
It's more like mobile got package management right.
Windows is terrible as an example to use for installing/removing software as it has extremely crude (almost non-existent) package management system (referring to Windows Installer here -- .msi files). [0]
I like to think of the App store (and equivalent) as a Linux command-line beautified by a GUI shell in a mobile form-factor.
But doesn't that make you better at troubleshooting and fixing problems in Linux -- a useful skill to have?
When I get a new Debian box, I just sudo apt-get install a list of my most-common programs and I'm off to the races.
Export the packages:
dpkg --get-selections > list.txt
dpkg --set-selections < list.txt
apt-get -f installJust looking through the list here though, that's going to dump out the list of all of the installed packages, not just the ones I've requested explicitly I think. That's the part that the App Store gets really right. I still want all of the dependencies for the packages that are getting installed, but a way shorter list of "these are the things you've explicitly asked for"
It seems like that is actually inside Apt somewhere too... since it does keep track of packages to auto-remove when their reverse dependencies go away.
That being said, I'm sure Windows could have done some stuff better, but it came of age in a hardly connected era and you need omnipresent internet connections for the mobile software distribution model, so it's kinda hard to blame Microsoft too much for being able to see around the corner.