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Comment by Tichy | Hacker News Reader

"“You make a beautiful magazine for the iPad, and then you dumb it down for Android’.

That meant removing movies, sound, interactivity and content."

Interesting, I wasn't aware that Android devices can't play movies or sound, and don't react to touch.

The exact H.264 profile supported by different devices varies greatly -- it is not an issue with Android the OS but with the range of different devices in the Android ecosystem. With only a few iOS devices, you can test them all with your encoded media (in fact most media encoders have presets for iOS devices) and offer encodings that support all devices.

This simply isn't possible with Android. Either you lower the quality (because your video must all be H.264 Baseline 3 for compatibility) or you'll simply get pockets of oddball devices that can't play media (because they don't support the entire set of Main or High profile video features).

Additionally, the magazine is probably using HTTP Live Streaming to handle media (the ideal protocol for streaming to iOS devices). While Android technically supports this in Android 3 and 4, there are differences in supported features. Specifically, most of the features in version 3 of HTTP Live Streaming (which came out in iOS 5) -- including multiple audio tracks, closed captions, frame based indexes and more -- are not supported in Android.

You make an interesting point. Would it not be possible though, to host multiple encoding profiles on a server somewhere, and have the device download the best match for its screen and decoding capabilities?

I'm sure it is possible. I'm not sure it is worthwhile/profitable to manage, support and test such a set up.

As far as I can renember this is a core feature of HTML5 video support: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video#Multiple_sources

Presumably then they still want to add a purchasing scheme on to the audio/video, I'm guessing that's already embedded in Apple's offering.

E.g. look at https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/id481037450?mt=8&src=af&..., they have music tracks that you can play (see example pages on horizontal scroll section); presumably you can click-through and buy them somehow?

Don't worry about it, this article is obvious Apple-fanboism combined with Android FUD. (And I say that without any emotion attached, as I own neither Apple nor Android devices.)

Essentially anything that mentions fragmentation is about spreading FUD. Let's not forget that you can limit your app/mag/etc to any devices you want. It's disappointing as the TNW are fairly reputable.

> Essentially anything that mentions fragmentation is about spreading FUD.

I am going to assume by this statement that you've never worked on an Android project before. I work for an enterprise company with lots of Android apps and fragmentation is very much real.

The HTC Desire and Samsung Galaxy S3 are both very popular and still being sold today. It is extremely difficult (borderline impossible) to make one decent app run on both. You have to build two apps.

What differences between the Desire and S3 were causing you problems? Screen size/resolution? API versions?

I have developed and tested apps that run just fine on both of these devices. No different builds, not even different layouts. You're right, fragmentation is real, but it is not an unsolved problem in the Android world.

Fragmentation is.. ...10% bad luck. You are stuck and there is nothing you can do ...90% bad planning. And THIS is why you use abstraction.

I think this is because a lot of the content was downloaded from iTunes, and they just didn't have the infrastructure to support that on Android.

Indeed. One wonders how their interest and monetization would have gone if they'd partnered with Amazon or Google for content on Android instead of pointing at iTunes.

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