One month later, Honeycomb has just 50 native apps | Hacker News Reader

One month later, Honeycomb has just 50 native apps

arstechnica.com

14 pointsredacted26 comments

Well, there's only one device, and no real person can afford it or would buy it with all the bugs. Motorola is hit or miss. The Xoom is a miss. The only people I've seen with a Xoom either work for Motorola or work for a tech review site. Otherwise, they simply don't exist. There's no market yet.

In June, when the real hardware manufacturers start cranking these things out, I think we'll see an increase in apps. I'm looking forward to what Asus and Samsung bring to the table.

But to be honest, I'm sick of "apps" -- just make your little toy a website, please. Then I can use it on any device without any effort on your part. (Yeah, then there's no "app store", but who cares? All the app store is is someone that takes 30% of your money and lets idiotic users post comments like "Not enough space on my device for this! Negative eighty stars!" all over your app's page. Why would you want that?)

App Store provides easy monetization and discoverability. If you want to make money off of a side project, I'd argue a native app is a far easier route to take than a web app.

How much money are side projects actually making people? (Taxes are a big issue. Is your app really worth enough to have to deal with a 1040 + 1099s instead of the 1040EZ?)

I've made ~110K in my first 9 months on the app store. Apple takes care of scalability, monetization, discovery, etc. Native mobile apps are just so much easier to make money off of, which is why they are taking off.

Before or after income taxes?

before

"All the app store is is someone that takes 30% of your money".

Would one earn the same money with a toy website, though?

The iOS developer they quote extensively seems somewhat confused:

"And even if developers wanted to create such a “true tablet experience,” they’re hard-pressed to do it without the source code for Honeycomb, which Google is currently keeping a tight reign over. The big device manufacturers working on Honeycomb-powered hardware—like HTC, Motorola and Samsung—all have early access to the code, but only after licensing agreements were made with Google. Smaller developers don’t have this luxury."

Why would he think the source to Honeycomb is required to make an app scale to different screen sizes and resolutions?

I'm also wondering what the definition of "native" is in the headline.

Came here to post that quote. Anyone who's done android dev should know the two issues are pretty much separate. I mean, following his logic iOS devs would still be hard pressed to develop iPad and iPhone apps because the iOS source isn't available.

Is this the kind of journalism Ars and Wired need to do to get access to Apple exclusives or something?

To be fair, that paragraph isn't explicitly attributed to the iOS developer, and may in fact be speculation from the article's author -- possibly added as a way to link to the other Honeycomb articles.

The linked article talks about how modders are unable to tweak the Xoom without Honeycomb source. It sounds like the author is confusing modding Honeycomb with developing apps for it.

Honeycomb SDK time line:

27 Jan 2011: Preview released

22 Feb 2011: Officially released

24 Feb 2011: First Honeycomb device publicly available

3 Mar 2011: Fragments API for pre-Honeycomb release

So, there was less than a month before developers could even start doing any type of Honeycomb development before the first device was shipped. It has only been slightly more than a month before developers have had a stable API to use, and less than a month to have an API to try to do development that should work well on both tablets and phones.

So, I'm not surprised there aren’t more ‘native’ Honeycomb apps.

>I'm also wondering what the definition of "native" is the headline.

Because Honeycomb tablets will happily run older Android 2.x apps in a scaled up compatibility mode. The "Native" refers to apps specifically written just for Honeycomb or those existing apps which also specifically support Honeycomb.

The comparison in iOS was the way that iPad pixel-doubled existing iPhone apps, the iPad specific apps developed just for iPad, and Universal apps which were developed for both iPhone and iPad.

From his blog:

"My criteria for considering an app for this list is that it either requires Android 3.0 or have its user interface be specifically designed for a tablet experience. I didn’t count games or existing Android apps that are just upconverted to take advantage of the existing screen real estate. While it is a marginally better experience than trying to run an iPhone app on an iPad, I’m not counting it given that Apple doesn’t count the hundreds of thousands of iPhone exclusive apps in its 65,000 iPad app count."

So "native" seems to refer to having a redesigned UI, and if your UI naturally scales (displaying or taking pictures, showing video, 3D or vector based games, webpages, maps etc.) then that's not "native" by this definition.

Seems like a "no pain no gain" approach, if your app just works on multiple resolutions than that counts as a demerit for the OS, rather than as a good thing.

There also seems to be widespread ignorance about the pre-Xoom and pre-Honeycomb tablets that are out there. They're only for hobbyists since they don't ship with the Google Market, but people have been using them, and debugging their apps on them for many months.

He is a good developer who sadly seems to be heading into the Apple punditry game. Which comes with a tendency to misstate things. I'll give you one guess who he is emulating from his site design: http://carpeaqua.com/

There's a few background issues here to acknowledge:

* The honeycomb emulator is pretty much unusable for development. It's beyond slow, meaning that any sort of practical development is going to need a physical device. Compare this to the iPad emulator, which is snappy and very usable for development without needing an actual iPad.

* The xoom has been out for a month, but it wasn't until last Sunday that you could buy a wifi-only version and avoid paying the Verizon tax. Several people (myself included) eagerly bought xooms on Sunday in order to start developing.

* The app situation is grim, but it isn't as grim as the article leads you to believe. Android apps are already built with resizable layouts due to the device fragmentation everybody talks about. As such, most phone apps scale reasonably well even if they haven't been updated for tablets. This is a far better situation than the 2x scaling of iPhone apps on the iPad.

So, while there are reasons that honeycomb development has been stalled up until this point, those reasons are quickly disappearing, making it a great time to start developing.

Perhaps the intersection of people who think "it's just a big phone and I really want a laptop" and people who develop for android is quite high.

Still - given Honeycomb is being touted as the "ipad killer", and ignoring the silliness of that concept, it is surprising that developers aren't seeing the xoom as a good way of getting ready for the flood of honeycomb devices that is apparently coming. It's hard to work out from the various trolling headlines about how iOs or Android has "won" something or other - but doesn't Android have quite a healthy developer base? are they making money?

Perhaps the intersection of people who think "it's just a big phone and I really want a laptop" and people who develop for android is quite high.

I don't know if that's true, but it's still a really intriguing question, thank you! The follow-up also seems relevant: What is the intersection between people who think "it's just a big phone and I really want a laptop" and people who buy android?

If the market for android tablets is also the market for netbooks, that could be a problem. Apple is going out of their way to distance the iPad from netbooks and sell to people who don't want a laptop--or already have one and are buying this as a third device after their phone and laptop.

IMO I think it's because people don't believe there's a good Honeycomb device available, and that the platform might not be quite ready for primetime.

Apple tend to come out swinging, they deliver tools to developers months before, have a solid platform on day one, and excellent hardware. I think dealing with a heterogeneous hardware platform makes it that much harder to deliver such quality out of the gates, especially when you don't control the hardware.

Having said that, there appears to be a minimum spec for hardware, and so far vendors have not deviated substantially. Still, the Xoom's subpar reviews have not helped the cause.

I think a big part of the difference between launch/early apps is the state of the emulators. Apple's emulator runs quite fast due to using a lot of native desktop code, and is in many ways suitable for testing at least a 1.0 version [1]. Android's emulator is a full virtualized stack and runs significantly slower than the target platform, making it hard to get a real idea of how well your program is running.

Hence, while you could be pretty confident releasing a day one iPad app, many android devs would balk at the same situation with Honeycomb. A lot of devs may be waiting for a different tablet than the Xoom as well, while Apple devs obviously could all buy theirs on day one.

The Xoom and 3.0.0 honeycomb both feel a bit rushed, there is probably a good argument for calling it a preview out here in reality. I don't think that's an indictment of the platform over all, though.

[1] Not an active iOS dev, but that's how I remember it.

i was lucky enough to get my honeycomb app featured (DrawFree) and have been considered on the the few honeycomb specific apps -- i don't believe this is true. the market just doesn't offer a way to find honeycomb optimized apps.

also, android's method of scaling apps is far more usable than the way the ipad does it. visual quality doesn't suffer (mostly), just some minor usability issues with things being far too small.

One of the comments claims that iPhone apps with art assets designed specifically for the iPhone 4 don't use them, but instead pixel double the smaller art assets for use on the iPad. Is that true?

He seems to think this is a good thing, but it means the comparison of Android scaling and iPad scaling is even less true, as on the iPad it is intentionally made to look worse than it could.

The comment states that the iPad is upscaling the iPhone 3GS graphics on the iPad, rather than just using the higher resolution iPhone 4 retina graphics at near full resolution.

I'm 90% sure that this is the case. I think that the main reason why Apple did this is because the iPhone 4 has 512 MB RAM, and the iPad 1 only has 256 MB(iPad 2 has 512). That could make performance with the higher resolution graphics an issue for the iPad.

I can verify this is the case. I have Final Fantasy III on iPad, which is a native Retina display app for iPhone 4, and it only displays with iPhone 3GS graphics in pixel doubled mode.

This is unfortunate, and I think you're right. The iPhone 4 does have better graphics hardware than the iPad 1. It would be interesting to see if iPad 2 could overcome this limitation. Judging by the video I saw of an iPad 2 outputing 1080P to HDMI at 60 frames per second running Real Racing 2 HD, I would say that the iPad 2 has the graphics hardware to handle actually scaling a native iPhone 4 retina display app to it's own resolution.

The iPad doesn't upscale images. It just uses the non-2x images natively.

I think it's funny that the article mentions that there needs to be more hardware with Honeycomb to have more apps. Sorry but if hw like the iPad is built well enough and with enough hw options, then that's enough of a reason to build apps for it, in advance of any sales.

Google is always playing the catchup game, being slow and patient and then storming the market with new devices whenever they feel ready.

I think a good web based design can make a lot of "native" application irrelevant. That, probably is what google wants anyway.

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