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Comment by CmonDev | Hacker News Reader

We asked for Android support and this is what we get instead?

http://support.fiftythree.com/customer/portal/questions/8218...

Fuck 'em. Someone should clone Paper on Android and take all the market share before the original developers port it. If this happens with enough iOS-only apps, the developers will start learning.

Learning what? I suspect they already know that the world is full of angry, immature, entitled people.

Learn that there is a much bigger market out there than the hipsters and Apple fanbois using iOS devices. The first step might be to spend some time outside San Francisco and wear looser jeans.

It might be bigger but is it more profitable?

This comment is a very ineffective way to disprove anu_gupta's point. :)

Maybe starting from this https://code.google.com/p/markers-for-android/ and improving.

IMHO a Wacom tablet, costs less than 50$ and you can find them for as low as 20$, is a better alternative (more levels and the stylus is more precise)

It is that surprising? When you have limited dev resources it's smart to focus on the platform that would garner the most attention and profit.

The thing is the Android market is much bigger. Maybe history will repeat itself?

* Company makes a great innovative product on iOS * Competitor gets to Android first, embracing the platform * Company finally releases an half-assed Android port with iOS look and useless back buttons while Competitor is already established on Android

=> After the Android launch failure, Company publishes numbers comparing iOS and Android sales and claim "See, no profit to be done on Android!"

The number of android devices is much bigger but because most of those devices are at the extreme low end, especially in tablets, the market for Android software and accessories is much smaller.

Has this happened? It does make sense to me and seems like a good opportunity for a competitor but I can't think of a case where a very popular iOS app lost out to an android alternative.

Didn't they just raise a $15m series A funding round?

I don't think this is to do with limited resources, I suspect the real reason is around fragmentation and whether / where the market is for Android. Fragmentation is a real issue and most of the things being done to improve it don't feel like they'd help an app like Paper where I suspect that they're doing some fairly low level things to get it to behave the way it does.

That applies doubly for Pencil - do they really want to try and get their hardware to work with every shitty bluetooth stack on every cheap Android tablet? It the Galaxy Tab 10.1 was selling by the bucket you could see why that might be an appealing market, but that's very different to the Android tablet market. They're only supporting five out of the seven iPads that have been made...

The last comment says We are being very careful while building our company, so it’s not merely a financial issue.

Exactly, grandma needs her new Christmas present!

A guy politely telling the posters that the company is focused on iOS, but offering a job opportunity to someone to port to Android? That seems completely positive to me.

notice he isn't offering a job to work on an android port. He is offering a job to a top developer who is up for the challenge. But since there is no budget allocated to it ("there is not specific android job listing"), then this new top developer will work on iOS for awhile.

If you're hired to port a system to a new platform, it may not be a bad idea to spend time working on it on the current platform(s). Especially since iOS <-> Android conversions aren't always straightforward. If they developed it in Objective-C using Apple's supplied libraries for GUI, network IO, etc, they'll be doing less porting and more rewriting. From then on they'll be maintaining two code bases, not just a fork that replaces certain segments with Android specific patches.

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