Windows Phone 8 vs. iOS vs. Android: One giant leap for Microsoft
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
But I now use an iPhone. The reason is lack of quality 3rd party software. The PDF viewer available for WP7 (there was only one) was absolutely abysmal. Very poor UX. And that was all to often the case. Where Android or iOS would have numerous great apps, WP7 would have significantly less and usually all lower quality. Such a shame as the OS itself is pretty nice.
Windows Phone has been catching up and can probably do so more quickly now that the phone and desktop OSes can use similar code.
Edit: Since I am being downvoted for my opinion, I will add some evidence
"An app for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 can share the same code and the same basic user interface, since both platforms use the Metro design language, according to Wissinger."
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/258094/microso...
You can't expect a user to stick with an incomplete platform when there is viable competition, based solely on promises that the situation will improve. In fact, since Microsoft has announced that current Windows Phone 7 hardware will not run Windows Phone 8, anybody who was counting on their phone getting more useful over time has been proven to be a sucker.
Making this change likely involves significant capital cost investment that is not done lightly and without a great deal of forethought. You think it's a coincidence that this gets announced 2 days after the Surface (which is clearly a bridging device) and a week after leaks appears for a new XBox (what OS do you think that will run)?
This whole thing has pretty obviously been planned out a long time ago, and Microsoft are starting to lay down their cards to show their hand. And it's increasingly looking like they have been putting together a pretty strong hand.
Keep in mind this change almost instantly increases the potential market a phone app developer can tap into because it will be available to desktop users as well. You've just gone from developing for WP7 users, to every Win 8 user. That is an order of magnitude increase. Add to that XBox users.
I think Microsoft will catch up much faster than most people anticipate.
Edit: Ok I will rephrase the premature thing: Experience of using the phone from 1 year ago is not a valid criticism of the ecosystem today. Even less so for a new ecosystem that is not going to be released for another 3-6 months.
Any game that already runs on smartphones will need to replace OpenGL ES with DirectX, and any app that currently runs on a Microsoft platform will need to be re-designed to work on a touchscreen, and still probably also re-write the whole GUI to use Metro.
The best that Microsoft can expect with Win8 as they are currently planning is for the first several months of app releases to be hasty ports that get their platform some credibility but don't actually make it look better than the alternatives, with good apps starting to show up by the end of the first year. But there's no way they'll close the gap quickly with anything other than badly-ported apps.
And in the meantime, barring massive bribery/subsidies from Microsoft, the only people who will be buying Windows phones are "early adopters" who just want to play with something different. That crowd isn't big enough to fund direct competition with Android and iOS.
First, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube—and since then it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results. Without proper access to YouTube, Bing and other search engines cannot stand with Google on an equal footing in returning search results with links to YouTube videos and that, of course, drives more users away from competitors and to Google.
Second, in 2010 and again more recently, Google blocked Microsoft’s new Windows Phones from operating properly with YouTube. Google has enabled its own Android phones to access YouTube so that users can search for video categories, find favorites, see ratings, and so forth in the rich user interfaces offered by those phones. It’s done the same thing for the iPhones offered by Apple, which doesn’t offer a competing search service.
Unfortunately, Google has refused to allow Microsoft’s new Windows Phones to access this YouTube metadata in the same way that Android phones and iPhones do. As a result, Microsoft’s YouTube “app” on Windows Phones is basically just a browser displaying YouTube’s mobile Web site, without the rich functionality offered on competing phones. Microsoft is ready to release a high quality YouTube app for Windows Phone. We just need permission to access YouTube in the way that other phones already do, permission Google has refused to provide.
This sentence really leapt out at me. Are we looking at the same rainbow disaster screen shots? Windows phone looks like a unicorn puked on a phone.
I don't think it give any compelling reason on it's own for iOS to shift.
For me, the iOS homescreen is too limiting. All an app can do is show its icon and a number of pending notifications. Android is too far the other way- widgets can be far too attention grabbing and obtrusive- silly animations of clouds moving in front of a sun, nonsense like that. WP hits a great balance between the two- widgets/tiles are of a fixed size, and the metro aesthetic means that none are too visually invasive.
I have a Windows Phone that I used as my primary phone for a few months before switching back to Android. The third party support wasn't there and the Maps functionality was dire. But I think that it has the best UI of any mobile OS out there right now- it's genuinely a joy to use. Getting Nokia on board looks to solve the issue with maps, and hopefully this codebase synchronisation will result in more third party developers making quality apps.
We'll see. Well, I won't, because my phone won't run WP8...
Pure unadulterated BS. Carry on.
Edit: The mod down is funny. So "almost every" Android widget has "far too attention grabbing and obtrusive- silly animations of clouds moving in front of a sun, nonsense like that" now? Almost every single one? Because that's what he said. I actually have several Android devices and it is absolutely not true that almost every widget is like that.
And furthermore, who says weather widgets with the sun and clouds and whatever else are silly? There are a lot of people that actually like those widgets and it seems a bit arrogant to condescend their tastes just because you think you know better.
This brand of partisan hate and mod-bombing is why I avoid the comment section on almost every tech site these days.
But the vast, vast majority of apps are not. And that carries through to widgets as well. As I said, I don't know exactly why that is- poor guidelines on Google's party, bad tools, I don't know. But Android is hugely inconsistent.
As far as your question of why Android apps look like crap sometimes I would imagine that devs have an easier time making money in the iOS app store so they make a larger effort polishing the apps that they put in there. Some apps are exactly the same between Android and iOS like Pulse. Some apps have a better iOS counterpart like the Engadget app. And of course, some very similar apps have better Android versions like gReader vs. Feedler.
I have devices that run iOS, Android and Windows Phone and for many reasons, I use my Android devices 90 percent of the time and the 10 percent of the time I use the other stuff it has nothing to do with the quality of the apps.
Part of Apple's strength in their walled-garden is that they have created an ecosystem of design. Google tried to do the same, and enforce style guidelines, to no avail. Seems like Microsoft has created a similar ecosystem that encourages usability.
Yeah, the Android experience is so "tarnished" that the OS ships on almost a million phones a day. Did you ever consider the possibility that the majority of consumers have a different opinion of what is useable than you?
Also, I said "can" tarnish the platform experience, not "will" or "did". Ask a professional designer to compare the general style and branding of the WP, Apple, and Android platforms. They will likely tell you that there is a clear cohesion between Apple apps.
Android ships on an incredible amount of phones because of availability. How many free iPhones do you get on activation? It's a cheap (and good) platform for a carrier and vendors to use. Thus, the volume of Android devices is high. Furthermore, volume shipped has almost nothing to do with usability. How many different vendors have created their own UI for Android?
P.S. I'm not an apple fanboy. I have a Droid X and a Kindle Fire, both rooted and toyed with various ROMs.
I'm not a UI expert, so maybe I'm missing something awesome. I am, however, a user of consumer electronics, and as far as that qualifies me to comment, I think it looks like crap and would never buy a Metro UI based product.
There have been many reports here and there about how people like metro. But without such study, anyone saying it looks "good" or "bad" are just worthless anecdotes. Of course it's subjective, what really matters is what the majority of the target audience thinks.
To you, looking at the screenshots, you see a mess of a UI. My me, looking at the home screen my my WP7 I see my Fiance, my brother, my Mother and my Best friend and it toggles between their picture and their latest Facebook updates.
My phone doesn't look like "unicorn poop" to me. It might to you, though.
I imagine Microsoft has data about what people like/dislike about Metro, and they are doubling down on it so the data is probably leaning in the "good" direction.
This type of criticism doesn't really help, because the vast majority of people seem to think both (metro, and iOS) look fine, if not great. What matters is how usable these phones/OS'es will turn out to be once people start trying them.
I haven't heard anything positive, however, from normal people. Just my experience though.
And what accounts for all of the fawning over the Lumia devices? Those things are terribly ugly in my opinion. Subjective opinion again.
I don't know if this will die down or not; that's what eventually happened when Google revealed the Nexus 1 (iirc) wouldn't be upgradable to 4.0. So far, though, this point is significantly distracting from the amazing improvements in '8 - note how the linked article mentions it in the first paragraph, and I've seen at least one mainstream article [0] focused entirely on it.
There must be a lesson about product launches in this. If Microsoft had a good answer for this from the start - by "good", I mean one that satisfied journalists and their readers, and/or made it hard for anyone to stoke outrage - the positive press coverage for WP8 wouldn't have been diluted by this.
[0] http://mashable.com/2012/06/20/no-upgrade-windows-phone-8/
The issue from a PR perpsective is that MS don't seem to be controlling the story here. Will WP8 apps work on 7.8? Sources are totally conflicted. Will 7.8 do multitasking? No-one knows. MS should have been all over this out of the gate- explaining exactly what 7.8 users are getting. Instead everyone is resorting to rumour and assuming the worst.
It sounds like they're doing just this in spirit by backporting some features to Windows 7, but calling it Windows 7.8 instead of Windows 8. Marketing mistake?
The Lumia 900 came with WP 7.5. And now it's not getting WP8, just some features from it. How is that the same?
EX: iOS 6 comes out this fall and is backward compatible all the way to 3GS phones which came out June 19, 2009, but not 3G which came out July 11, 2008 which they stopped supporting with iOS 4.2.1 on November 22, 2010.
However, you can buy WP7 phones right now that will not be able to run the latest OS when WP8 comes out. If I were selling these things (or Nokia), I'd be pretty frustrated about that.
Why pre-announce? Osbourne effect FTL.
And even then, is the GUI actually appropriate for all of your deploy targets? Usually not.
Given that the mobile GPUs are targeted to that, I have to think it will. Having portability between the desktop and mobile is less valuable, really, given that even the most impressive mobile GPU pales compares to a miserable desktop GPU. The limitations would render such an exercise much more prohibitive.
DirectX is going to be much more compelling for developers IF Microsoft can unify Windows, Windows Phone and XBox Live Arcade together. The idea that I could write one game and sell to all of them would be huge.
Aside from the completely different experiences across all of them (both in capabilities of the platform, input methods, etc -- smartphone games tend to be quite unique), from a pure numerical perspective there are what, 55 million or so xboxes sold, and while there are countless PCs, the PC gaming contingent continues to shrink and favours an entirely different type of game.
There are 400 million+ Android devices out there, and 400 million+ iOS devices.
If you're developing a touch/sensor based smartphone app, being able to port it to other smartphones is dramatically more valuable than being able to port it to an entirely different platform.
The secure boot nonsense doesn't help. The image of M$ is destroyed, and even if they try to repair it I can never forgive them for ie6.
You can never forgive them for making the absolute best browser on the market at the time it was released? Don't blame Microsoft because there are people out there are still trying to use IE6 today.
Do Apple and Google not also have a "treasure chest of influence"?
I'm not saying Microsoft is evil - they are just a massive company, who like Apple is controlled by shareholders and therefor maximizes profit at the expense of everything around them.
I have no idea what is going on with Google. Android 3.0 and the unified privacy plans being closed source seems like a good example of how their benevolence may only be skin deep, but they have acted "better" than the others at some superficial level. They are still absurdly powerful and I would always be hesitant to give them money, because companies like all three can turn around and use that absurd influence to harm consumers.