Hacker News Reader

I use skritter.com for practising Chinese. They recently released an iOS app after several months work. There is currently no plan to produce an Android app, partly because there is a partial web / flash solution available on Android, but I assume also that the numbers didn't add up for putting the work in to porting the iPhone app.

This is a must-have application for learning to write Chinese in my opinion, to the extent that people would buy an iOS device just to use it. There is no equivalent for Android. I carry around an iPhone as a work phone, and pretty much only use it for this.

So learning Chinese is a little niche, but I'm sure there are other niches where people rely on a particular app, this app is not available on Android, and so they wouldn't switch for this reason.

>There is no equivalent for Android.

Have you tried MonkeyWrite? http://www.monkeywriteapp.com/

(Android only)

Just tried it, nice enough, but not really on the same level. I'm up to 1,500+ characters on Skritter after hundreds of hours, I think that whole app with all the add-ons would take about 30 minutes to get through for me. Doesn't look to have spaced recognition like Skritter does either.

Interesting but you aren't really answering his tablet specific question. Looking at the screenshots of this app it appears to just been blown up on the iPad. That's the very thing that people criticize Android apps for doing.

I don't use on iPad but guess it will come there before Android. You're right I'm not answering tablet specific questions, just looking at app availability versus iOS.

There is a truckload of apps that are iOS only. iA writer, paper, penultimate, infinity blade, just off the top of my head. Great quality apps abound, and usually their iPad versions make great use of the screen real estate, instead of just rescaling the interface.

Lots of others have started on iOS and were only released for Android much later (Flipboard, Angry Birds, Instagram).

> could anyone please give me an objective argument

I think it is really subjective and about the "long tail" of apps. If I say that OmniFocus locks me into the Appleverse, someone else will mention an Android-exclusive app and we'll (objectively ;)) discuss for hours. Carcassonne and Anthill may not have worthy Android ports, but I'm probably missing out on Google's best-in-class maps.

The shopping experience may also have a lot to do with each platform's perception. The Play front page[1] looks absolutely uninviting to me. In iTunes or on the iPad, I usually scroll around and discover apps by topic. What do I do in the Play store if I know all the front page apps already (not hard)?

[1] for those of us who are abroad: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

> What do I do in the Play store if I know all the front page apps already (not hard)?

Click on the categories link on the left side, and then browse.

Or select on any app you like and use and scroll down to "Users also Installed" and "Users also Viewed". This is a great way to find cool stuff.

It's also unclear if the grandparent is talking about the literal front page of "featured" apps, or the infinite scrolling list of "top" apps by all the categories (currently: Paid, Free, Grossing, New Paid, New Free, and Trending).

I mean, I'm sure one can ding the Play Store for UI wierdness in places, but discoverability has never been one of its flaws in my view.

Good point about "People also liked".

I meant the literal front page of both stores: Clicking the "App Store" tab in iTunes (same as opening "App Store" on the iPad), vs. going to the page I've linked.

Both stores have categories, but I don't enjoy browsing through them. By topic, I meant the hand-picked thematic groups of apps on the App Store front page, like "Racing Games", "Cookbooks", "Fun for Two Players", "Apps for Travelling" etc. - I really enjoy those. Everything that is hand-picked feels a hundred times more interesting than an automated list to me.

IMHO all appstores actually fail when it comes to app discovery. It comes down to lists of apps and full text search in app descriptions, ranked by such poor metrics as number of installs or user ranking.

If you need an app for iOS or android, do the same thing you do when you need an app for the web:

ask a search engine!

http://goo.gl/kw8UK

http://goo.gl/66kVp

That works when you know what you want, i.e. for the first handful of apps. And on almost every tablet I've seen, games outnumber apps.

And when this thread got me curious and I was googling for Android versions of games I like, I had to dig through pages of spam to realize there was no port.

Another example. I'm in Hong Kong and I see them advertising a real time next train app on the MTR, i.e. subway system. iPhone only. They support Android, but iPhone comes first:

http://www.mtr.com.hk/eng/whatsnew/mtrmobile.html

Most significant Android apps look "okay" on tablets these days in the sense that they are using Android layouts and the icon bitmap dpi system so that when they are scaled up to tablet resolutions they look pretty good, but outside of Google's own apps, very few of them are really "tablet optimized" in the sense that they make extensive use of dual-pane fragment-style UI concepts. Generally they are just bigger, decent looking versions of the single-screen-per-view UIs as seen on Android phones and they feel like that, which isn't horrible, but isn't really taking advantage of the larger (usually) higher resolution displays Android tablets have over phones.

Any examples, though? Honestly that's my experience with the iPad too -- outside of the core apps most stuff looks pretty mediocre, and mostly the same as on an iPhone.

I strongly prefer Android to iOS, and I have both android (Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.0 and Asus Transformer) and Apple (iPad 1 and 2) tablets. One app I use quite a bit on the iPad is DirecTV. It makes TV watching a better experience by providing a nice interface to control your TV, search through the guide and movies, your recordings, and on-demand content and you can even stream shows to it. Contrast this with the Android version, which is a dumb guide with very limited features. It's really a night and day difference.

I think Android will catch up, but it's not hard to find examples like this.

Isn't this a difference in what DirecTV has implemented in their applications? I read the OP as asking for applications that do not function on an Android tablet or function significantly different on an Android tablet vs. an Android phone.

It's pretty clear you've never actually seen an iPad app.

Because if you had then you would know that just because you can view a "mobile" website on your laptop it doesn't make it optimal. iPad apps are specifically designed to make best use of the real estate and there are a number of iPad-only UI concepts.