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Comment by leobelle | Hacker News Reader

So where are all the tablet apps, because there are like zero tablet apps.

I am on my third Android tablet (a Kindle Fire HDX). My first Android tablet was the first Samsung 7" tablet that came out with Gingerbread on it, back in like 2010. I got a free iPad from my job a few years ago and gave that to my daughter and have upgraded her iPad since. She has a ton of children apps for her, that she has grown up with, and learned from. There are near no apps for my Android tablet this many years in. Personally I never want an iOS device, I just don't like the operating system, but I would really like at least some apps for Android. These marketshare numbers don't seem to have helped at all.

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I still blame Google for that. They made an absolutely terrible strategic error early on by saying developers don't need to make tablet apps" - because phone apps can just "scale up". At the time they were using the same flawed Microsoft philosophy of "one app everywhere".

That put off developers from making tablet apps, for a long, long time. And because of that it also had the side effect of affecting Android tablet sales, which in turn gave Android developers even fewer reasons to make tablet apps for Android.

I mean, can you believe it that only late last year Google decided to show users "tablet apps" by default when using a tablet? They finally did something to encourage developers to optimize their apps for tablets.

But I don't think it's enough. Normally, I don't think Google should've done this, but they are so late in the tablet app game now, that I think they should start forcing developers to optimize their apps for tablets, too, or have their apps kicked out of the store within a year.

I think it's a very reasonable time-frame, and it's not like they have to rewrite their apps from scratch to do it. If they did that, I think within 6 months we'd see Android tablet apps for everything.

Something else that I'd like them to do: kick out apps from the "Featured" or "Editor's Choice" that don't adhere to the Android style guidelines. You'd think that Google would want at least the hand-picked apps to be "made for Android", no? Do that, and watch how the top popular apps scramble to adhere to Google's standards.

> because phone apps can just "scale up"

This wasn't the reason, though. The reason is and was because on Android it is really quite easy to adapt to multiple screen sizes, and show different views based on screen size.

> Something else that I'd like them to do: kick out apps from the "Featured" or "Editor's Choice" that don't adhere to the Android style guidelines.

Totally agree. Google hasn't done enough to strongly encourage companies to make quality apps. Though these days when I see an application I consider to be poor in quality on Android I tend to find a similarly poor in quality app on iOS from the same company.

Because in general, you don't write tablet vs. phone apps for Android. Google is finding a better way that's not consumer unfriendly with adaptable layout engines that operate differently on a tablet vs. on a phone.

Specific distributions for various sized screens is an artifact of iOS, not a design idiom on Android.

https://developer.android.com/guide/practices/tablets-and-ha...

There are millions of shit apps for reference...

However there's this big one that comes with them all called a browser. It does all sorts.

The only apps that have an advantage over this app are the ones that have at least partially disconnected model i.e email, offline navigation, authoring or creative stuff and to a degree games.

Then again I'd rather have a real keyboard to write emails, a smaller device for my offline navigation and a bigger screen for authoring and creative stuff.

So basically, it's a browsing, email and games machine. And a crap one at that.

For reference I own a laptop and a smartphone. The mid ground seems pointless to me. Tablets are relegated to children's entertainment and they'd rather use the Xbox for that to be fair as Minecraft is better with real controls and it doesn't spam the hell out of you by trying to install apps via adtrack.king.com every two minutes.

"So basically, it's a browsing, email and games machine. And a crap one at that."

For you. Important distinction, just because you specifically haven't found a use doesn't mean others haven't. I know people who code on them, or do some spreadsheet twiddling, or (yes, slowly) write documents on them. For them a tablet is the right amount of compromises.

A 30 second search on YouTube reveals a plethora of digital artists, another might reveal a similar amount of digital musicians. Your use case isn't their use case.

Maybe you use your tablet differently, but all I really need is:

* Web (Chrome)

* Email (Gmail)

* Movies/TV shows (YouTube & Netflix)

* Reading (Kindle & Pocket)

* Music (Spotify & YouTube)

Edit: I forgot about Mango[0], a manga reader. This is one I have to sideload, since Mango essentially provides a native frontend to websites that host fan translations (Japanese to English) of copyrighted content. I can imagine that such an app can't be obtained on iOS without jailbreaking.

0: http://mango.leetsoft.net/

There are actually dozens of these apps for iOS (and have been around for years) including Manga Rock and Manga Storm.

There's actually a tweet from Zac Bertschy, Executive Editor of Anime News Network that complained about how many are available on iTunes:

https://twitter.com/ANNZac/status/202096701534765056

Because they are cheaper and there more OEMs pushing them out. However, Android tablet ecosystem sucks. Simple as that.

I've had two Android tablets (Asus Transofrmer TF101 and then a Nexus 7) ... Nexus admittedly a much better experience but I use my iPad mini so much more than both of those tablets put together. Higher quality apps and better accessory/device ecosystem provide for a superior overall experience.

I don't know, I had a first gen Nexus 7 and the experiences was pretty disappointing. Google cheaped out on the NAND and using more than 40% of the storage would cause it to stall, lag and generally behave like a pile of poop. It's somewhat mitigated by TRIM in Kitkat but not totally. On top of that, I had to RMA my N7 3 times to get one that was physically functional to begin with.

Overall quite disappointing

That's been fixed [1] by enabling TRIM for the eMMC as of Android 4.3 already. I wouldn't call the Kingston eMMC chips cheap, most of the time it's a buggy FTL (flash translation layer) that causes problems. Other manufacturers had more serious bugs that even caused data loss for the user (e.g. Samsung Galaxy S2 i9100/i777, Note n7000, etc. Cf. [2]).

[1]: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nexus-7-eMMC-controller-fst... [2]: https://plus.google.com/+AndrewDodd/posts/2eEd95oN1ZP

Yeah, I know...I even mentioned that TRIM fixes it. Still doesn't mean it wasn't a shitty experience for the many months before proper TRIM support landed

Money. Many Android tablets are full of pirate apps (you just need an APK file). Plus, IOS users are, on average, more willing to pay. It's why some apps are $0.99 on IOS and free with ads on Android.

Here in Uruguay, I don't see people pirating much. I do see a lot of free apps on Android though :) , and nobody is able to pay for an app... mostly because Apple doesn't understand or care that nobody has an international credit card.

Citation needed. If you are that kind of guy, you can easily pirate on any platform, iOS included.

Personally, despite you just needing to install an APK, I don't know a single Android-user running anything not installed from the Play store.

Obviously the XDA crowd is different, but they are a clear minority, and I know almost nobody IRL who goes that route.

I run the Amazon App Store and Humble Bundle on my Galaxy S4, both of which are APK files I side installed and I have many apps from both installed. I don't think I'm a minority in that regard, since these are businesses. As such I have lots of apps not from the Google Play Store. My Kindle HDX doesn't even have access to Google Play, so all the apps on it are from Amazon/Humble Bundle. They're just blown up phone apps for the most part.

ios users paying more: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/07/11/apple-users-buying-61...

The only occurrences of the the word "Android" are in that paragraph:

>More apps than Android: Apple's App Store has more than 425,000 apps. The Android Market has 200,000. In May, Google (GOOG) announced its 4.5 billionth app download, compared with Apple's 15 billion as of July 7.

Where do you read that iOS users were paying more than Android users in that article?

That article is from 2011... quite a lot has changed since then.

The vast majority of these devices are not being bought for apps, or even the browser. They are being sold as TV replacements for watching streaming video in Asia.

Also, Android devices that are are not tablets are counted in the statistics: http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/11/18/android-based-tv-s...

I'm surprised people find this still an issue. Almost all of the popular apps in the store seem to scale great on large displays these days. Notable exceptions are the official apps from Facebook & Twitter.

I just checked my tablet: Pocket Casts, Flipboard,Kindle, Pocket, Cal, Timely, Expedia, Skype, Imdb, Hacker News 2, Pinterest, Flow,... All have special layouts for large screens.

I think the lack of compelling tablet-only apps has contributed to the popularity of the 7" tablet form factor. Since we mostly use our tablets like oversized phones without voice capacity, they might as well be comfortable to use in portrait and have a phone-like experience.

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