Android and iOS continue to carve up the world
engadget.com
engadget.com
Regarding your second link specifically I know lots of folks who stick to using LTE on their Android devices instead of their wifi because LTE is often faster than their home internet, so I'm not sure that showing Android phones are less likely to use WiFi really means anything.
Actually Akamai research confirmed that Android and iPhone are neck to neck for cellular traffic. Because of the iPad wifi traffic for iOS is more than Android but that may change with the release of Nexus 7.
Most programs are written for business cases other than getting money from license sales to individuals.
Last year I wrote an Android app for a gambling company that now generates 4.5 million Euro in revenue every single month. And the app is not even in the Play store, you have to download it from a website that is embarrassingly hard to find. And the app can only be used in countries where gamling is legal.
We did not charge 99 cents for the app, and somehow there was money to pay my bills anyway.
Then there is the ebanking app I used today: free. And the hipmunk app I use to search for flights. Free. And the audible app. And the kindle app. And the facebook app. And the ebay app. And the Google Search app. And the wikipedia app. And an information app from my government. And the app that let's me see the TV program.
All free of charge. Still, there is a business model and good money behind almost all of these apps.
Again: there are definitely certain apps that you can sell for money, and statistics about how many people buy apps on each platform are of course interesting.
But app sales are not what makes a platform live or die. What makes a platform live or die is reach.
Android is currently in the hands of most people that own a smartohone. That includes rich people and poor people and those who buy apps and those who don't. If you want to reach people through their smartphones, then you want to make an app that runs on Android.
If you think about it, that's how FTP or Poker Stars works. Download a free client, even play for free for play money, earn money on rake once they convert to 'real money' players.
The direction does matter and android web traffic is definitely where I can see it.
If Android becomes the platform that "everyone" has, then the next disruptive consumer change is, almost by definition, going to happen there. This is largely what happened to the Mac -- the platform that had the best of everything in 1988 was, by 1994, suddenly unable to run all the new toys everyone wanted. When Win95 was released it wasn't even all that technically superior anymore. And by 1998 it was almost dead (and, but for the iPod's success, probably would have died).
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.k....
The Android share is somewhat like the DOS market at the beginning of the nineties. While DOS commanded a sizable share verses Mac OS, it was broken down into 3 variants (MSDOS, DRDOS, PCDOS) with sub versions (MSDOS 5, DRDOS 6 etc). While they were mostly compatible they had enough differences to cause developers headaches.
As they strip everything out of the web-pages except the text content (most of the time) it makes reading stuff on the web pretty decent.
Also remember that Apple's reward for losing was ending up the most profitable PC vendor so things didn't end up so bad for them.
Hell you can buy an iPhone through them.
The number of people who have them sometimes boggles my mind. I have friends and relatives for whom it is a major expense. People are paying quarter to half what they would pay on a car not for these phones.
I can't pay enough to upgrade my instant effortless global communicator and sudoku machine though.
On pretty much every metric except eyeballs, Android is losing (including the value of eyeballs - advertising doesn't matter if the people seeing your ads cant pay for your product), so why does 68% of market share matter?
Profit only matters if you own Apple. I'm more concerned with the variety of options I have as a consumer, and the competition between manufacturers driving them to produce better hardware.
Even if Android keeps gaining marketshare -lets say it gets to 70/75%- I don't think this will play the same way as Mac/PC did in the 90s. Most of what people do these days with a computer / phone is platform agnostic (web browsing, for instance).
This is Hacker News -- a site for people who set out to build things that don't exist yet. the ability to target 68% of the world's smartphone-using population seems pretty interesting to me. For example, consider an education platform, as Nicholas Negroponte attempted to with the OLPC project. Whether there's monetization or not, there might be an interesting opportunity there.
Open your mind a little. Not everything is about the profit-making horserace.
At the end of the day, it's money that makes the world go round. If you're making more profit than your competitors, you're getting ahead, because you have more money for R&D, more money for marketing, more money for buying promising start-ups, and more money for lawsuits.
I mean, the fact that Apple has a war chest of tens of billions of dollars in cash - more than the treasuries of many countries - paints a really bleak and hopeless future for Android.
This is like comparing two people with one making $1 million & the other $100,000.
Then saying that the latter has a very bleak future.
And I have to disagree with you, I don't believe that money makes the world go round.
In your world maybe.
Siri, remind enraged_camel to read this comment again in five years. Having a lot of money on hand doesn't mean you can easily spend all your competitors out of business.
How does stupid bullshit like this actually make it to this website?
However, smartphones could be life-changing for poor people. They probably won't be able to afford a computer but an Android phone for under $100 is within their reach.
Poor people with smartphones mean they have access to more information and will be able to communicate easier. I've read stories about how basic phones with SMS empowered people in poor countries. They could do much more with smartphones.
So if everything is about the money, yeah, Android is definitely losing.
(but I do agree with you in that battery life in most of the android phones is terrible)
With my Galaxy Note, the battery life improved, considerably after 5 or 6 charge cycles.
I've also used this tool a few times to figure out why my phone was running hot (even though I wasn't using it). For instance, last night, my Facebook app was in a bad state and was chewing up 20% CPU in the background. I killed it and everything was back to normal.
The tool isn't the easiest to use, but it might help.
(Disclaimer, I've owned a iPhone 3GS in the past, and this isn't my first android phone)
Sorry that you feel that way. Really, I do.
This is a recurring problem that undermines any ability to discuss these platforms without noisy conversations.
Your observations are not meaningful or unique or valuable, nor are your subjective comments (e.g. build quality) interesting. Let everyone who feels some compelling need to inject these useless mini-reviews in every discussion know this.
It would be nice if more people on HN back up their claims with facts and sources. Instead, people bring up anecdotal evidence and leave it at that.
---- Far less intuitive
This is kind of hand-wavy. Can you expand on this and say what you don't like about it? ----
Opinions are great, but they leave a lot to be desired, I think, unless you have a feel for the person.
If I know that you are very critical about particular UI elements and that you like iOS for specific features that are missing on Android, then great! I'll trust you with your opinion. But I don't know you, so fleshing out this anecdotal story into something more factual would be much better for me.
But compared to the iPhone, it's far less intuitive, it's build quality is crap, and I can't make it though a day on a charge
Ignoring hilariously subjective statements on intuitive interfaces or build quality (that fuzzy measure that has nothing to do with actual suitability to task or hardiness, but instead ends up being a reflection of what people have been told build quality is. If you make a hammer out of glass, is that superb built quality?), I'll focus on something more empirical -- battery life. I happen to have a GS III, and coincidentally I forgot to plug it in last night (it isn't the first time I've done this). I am currently on hour 29 off the charger, with medium to heavy use, with the battery at 33%. So what now? Do we wage a battle of anecdotes? Should we? Is that a productive use of HN?
The single objective measure you referred to is battery life, to which professionals have actual repeatable, regimented tests. You don't. Your statement on it is irrelevant.
(2) There are plenty of professional reviews that made the same points he made.
(3) Many professional reviewers also grade on a curve because it favors their business model.
"Personal ... summaries are not useful "
Is accusing random people's anecdotes of being "fictitious" and "agenda driven" useful and constructive behavior in your opinion?
And? It says nothing relative to my indisputable point that the noisy ruckus of anecdotes simply pollute every Android discussion.
There are plenty of professional reviews that made the same points he made.
Assuming that were true, then why post it? What is the point? "Hey everyone, guy who used an iPhone here: Let me tell you how it is..."
Is accusing random people's anecdotes of being "fictitious" and "agenda driven" useful and constructive behavior in your opinion?
Considering that my post was a discouragement of unconstructive posts, yes, for the purposes of this discussion it is absolutely useful.
I don't think many such anecdotes are fictitious like huggyface does--I think people just enjoy sharing their experiences--but I do think they are intensely irrelevant except en masse, and forums like these are not the place for that.
I would argue that it isn't true at all: People who are accustomed to one thing (whether it is taste in wine or acclimatization to an interface) tend to go into another thing from the basis that the things that are new are unimportant, and the things that are different are wrong. See: Every Facebook interface change. Actually simply see almost any interface change ever.
Coming from an iPhone is not an enlightened position, and it only holds relative merit in discussions with other people perhaps moving from an iPhone. To the general population it is meaningless.
However what I was speaking specifically to is the odd belief among the iPhone community that they have been exposed to what is right, and their subjective opinions are henceforth objective instead of just personal opinion.
Let me give you a perfect example -- the design of the Galaxy S III. It was openly mocked among the iPhone community as being a device designed by lawyers: It is unlike the iPhone, therefore it is a wrong design that must have been compromised to differ as much as possible. I'm not really terribly sensitive to designs of devices, so I had no personal opinion, but I have noticed that I keep hearing everyday normal people calling the Galaxy S III sexy. Isn't that bizarre? It was objectively called an ugly device by the people in the know, or so it seemed, only actual consumers think otherwise.
What's bizarre is that your "perfect example" is but another personal anecdote, the very thing you've spent the whole thread raging against.