Zotero for Android available for beta tests
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Just want to thank the devs for sharing it with the world :)
First, I think it was because the tooling was so much worse for Android than iOS, especially in the early years. And Google didn’t bother enforcing or even really outlining any HIGs for the longest time. It didn’t help that every Android maker had its own skin for the longest time (that is mostly over now, except for Samsung and some Chinese phone makers — and I would argue Samsung has a distinctive brand now that people buy their phones for their interface. They don’t want stock Android, they want the Galaxy Android experience).
But then even when you did have hit phones, like the first Motorola Droid and the Samsung Galaxy S (where the Galaxy S3 was a huge moment) and better dev tools, you still didn’t have users willing to pay for apps or even IAP. And it is hard to justify heavy-investment into a platform that people won’t pay for if your primary business is selling an app.
It also helps that iOS users typically have devices that are updated more regularly and that iOS devices are supported longer. And or course, there are fewer devices to test (though far more than there used to be).
The ROI on delivering a *good* experience for Android users is really low.
I, personally, believe that the platform has very little to do with that disparity of revenue at this point - but it is directly related to the demographic purchasing the phone. Android phones are often much easier to acquire with fewer financial resources. That is not the market Apple has targeted or has wanted to cater to in their quest to position themselves as a more premium brand. In some cases they may be and in others it is a marketing facade that people have bought into.
But, the reality is to deliver a good experience on Android isn't any harder than that same experience on Apple. Is it as financially rewarding? Probably not, again due to the difference in overall demographic of users. But I think it has very little to do with technical limitations or variances as described.
Just look at how apps are handled by the variety of folding Android phones today or devices with unusual aspect ratios. You get clipping and stretching in a lot of cases, even as recently as the latest Pixel Fold
iOS has much better UI libraries than Android. They also have a better constraint and relative positioning system that allows for UI to adapt to changes in screen ratios.
And none of that even addresses the disparity of Android versions in use. Yes, Google Play and Jetpack help paper over some of that, but good luck if you need to use a non-Google Play device or need to deal with some of the APIs that just don’t get shimmed. Or if you’re using graphics APIs and need to deal with the vendor and OS specific deviances in Vulkan implementation.
I very much disagree with your dismissal of it as a dated trope. As a game and app dev, targeting Android is incredibly annoying even today and results in targeting the most popular models in a demographic and hoping things scale outwards.
And, as I said, I "personally" believe this to be true. Android was much harder to develop for previously. It's a lot better. And I do see some of the same problems in the IOS ecosystem when I try to run apps clearly written for iPhone form factors on iPad.
But, my argument was stating that ROI was not really tied to the technical limitations (again I personally believe this to be true, being a mostly Android user) as stated and more on the demographic of user.
TL;DR I, personally, don't believe that technical limitations create ROI disparity between IOS and Android store revenue.
This can't really be true; it would imply that the actual value of all phone apps is zero, and the only reason people pay for them is that they need to get rid of some cash.
Thus, in order for people who don't find iPhones particularly valuable to contribute zero market share to the independent market for phone software, it can only be the case that phone software has no value.
I would say this is true for certain types of apps. Games, indisputably are Windows-first (and no matter what the Apple Game Porting Toolkit offers, without Apple going full Valve, this will remain the case), and certain business applications (AutoCAD, some medical stuff, other highly-specific and niche engineering apps, internal LOB apps for corporate clients environments) are either Windows-only or best on Windows, but I would argue that since at least 2005 or 2006, the amount of good software that is Mac-first or Mac-only is significantly higher than any other platform.
Obviously, in 2024, the web is the main application platform. The web won. But despite having a smaller market share (and today the market share is higher than any other time), there has long been a disproportionate ratio of good software on Mac versus other platforms.
Even for free apps, if they are associated with an optional payed service (like Zotero Storage), it can make economical sense to publish an iOS app first.
A common use case is in academia - it helps you track your citations and then output standardised reference lists, which is a pain to do by hand.
Other tools in this space are Mendeley and Endnote.
It also has a Word add-on that allows you to insert citations as dynamic Word "fields" linked to items in your Zotero Library, so citations can be automatically kept in sync with your Zotero Library and can be easily converted to different formatting styles.
Zotero Desktop extension allows you to convert any web page into an offline HTML. I found it very stable.
It is open source...
Not everyone, even in this forum is a software developer, and out of those who are - most work for an organization therefore don’t own what they develop and have limited influence to choose licensing of their work product.
At best we can perhaps maybe point out someone’s hypocrisy if they already develop software who’s licensing is under their control(I.e. not paid for by someone) and is also closed source and at the same time demand for open source from others . Even then I don’t think it is a good sentiment to have .
But I don't seem to be able to add annotations to a PDF and sync that back to my desktop, which is a bummer. I'm sure that will work in the future, and then I will finally be able to read and annotate papers on a tablet.
Okular set a high bar for what a good PDF Reader can do, this is surprisingly decent. The one killer feature which I don't anticipate any other software to implement any time soon is the "trim margins" feature of Okular, which makes pdfs so much more readable. For some.of those journals, the margins are like 30% of the width, that's some serious screen read estate, and the text is often too small already with academic papers.
Anyone have experience of using an iPad mini for this. Is the form factor do-able or really too small?
I like that I could read lying down with one hand, which I can’t achieve with a full-sized iPad.
I contemplated doing that, but went with an iPad Pro instead (11’’, second hand). Even 11’’ felt a bit small and I got a 13’’ eventually. Besides screen size, the Apple Pencil 2 is miles better.
> I like that I could read lying down with one hand, which I can’t achieve with a full-sized iPad.
Yes, for reading a Mini would be much better. More Kindle-like. The 11’’ Pro is still manageable with one hand (but without a case), but it’s not comfortable.
It doesn't have all the features of traditional document managers, but it will be far better for handling annotations.
Last but not least: thanks to the developers for the latest updates that bring zotero to a more modern experience. The iOS app specifically is awesome!
[1]: https://www.zotero.org/support/sync