Here's a guy who gets it:http://batsov.com/articles/2013/08/14/android-is-not-better-neither-is-ios/
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/balky-carriers-and-slow-oems-step-aside-google-is-defragging-android/It's not that Google is out of ideas, or the Android team is slowing down. Google has purposefully made every effort to make Android OS updates as boring as possible.
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It's such a simple idea: Android updates roll out too slowly, so start releasing all the cool stuff separately. The hard part is making it actually work. But the first reason this is now possible is a little app that has finally come of age: "Google Play Services."
Enlarge / Google Play Services can do whatever it wants.
Calling Play Services an "app" doesn't really tell the whole story. For starters, it has an insane amount of permissions. It's basically a system-level process, and if the above list isn't enough for whatever it needs to do next, it can actually give itself more permissions without the user's consent. Play Services constantly runs in the background of every Android phone, and nearly every Google app relies on it to function. It's updatable, but it doesn't update through the Play Store like every other app. It has its own silent, automatic update mechanism that the user has no control over. In fact, most of the time the user never even knows an update has happened. The reason for the complete and absolute power this app has is simple: Google Play Services is Google's new platform.This is how you beat software fragmentation. When you can update just about anything without having to push out a new Android version, you have fewer and fewer reasons to bother calling up Samsung and begging them to work on a new update. When the new version of Android brings nothing other than low-level future-proofing, users stop caring about the update.
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This is how you beat software fragmentation. When you can update just about anything without having to push out a new Android version, you have fewer and fewer reasons to bother calling up Samsung and begging them to work on a new update. When the new version of Android brings nothing other than low-level future-proofing, users stop caring about the update.
http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/google-play-doesnt-want-your-favorite-ios-indie-game-and-other-reasons-whyThe truth is, right now, Android sucks for indies.... the developers I talk to say Android is a frustrating and problematic place to release games. Especially dangerous is that at first, Android is arguably way more accessible to develop for than iOS; it's only after you've invested the time and pushed out your game that the real issues surface....While you might think the problem here is that it's hard to build a game that runs on so many different resolutions and processors, thanks to tools like Corona and Unity this actually isn't the case.The real problem is far more insidious. Cheap varied devices have brought smartphones to legions of users who wouldn't normally have them (either because of price, or interest), but the headless Android distribution scheme builds no infrastructure to teach these users how to actually use their devices, unlike Apple's Genius Bars. Not only that, but because of the variation in device displays, storage, and quality, it's hard for consumers to know if problems they encounter are with them, with the device, or with the software....This combination of many varied devices, uneducated users, and poor market construction leads to huge quantities of support emails, often far too many for small teams, including most indies, to handle.From my personal experience I can say that it's roughly 10-50x more emails per download than on iOS, and I'm looking at paid downloads! For freemium apps, the numbers are far worse. The situation is entirely unmanageable. Every developer that I've talked to about this issue told me the same thing: “Ignore support requests.”
I can't. I didn't keep a copy of it. Essentially, I asked if you were White Knighting for Apple since I know from your posts that you are down on the open source nature of Android. I basically said that you should stick with Apple's closed eco system and quit making it look like people who have gone with Android have made a mistake.After posting it, I felt it was offbase and uncalled for, so I deleted it. The fact is I didn't really have the right to say quit criticizing the Android OS. I may not agree with all of your stances, but I do like reading your posts, so I didn't want to create any bad blood with a surly sounding post.Now you have piqued my curiousity! PM it to me if you would!
I agree, this was and remains my philosphy. The conensus seems to be the app gold rush is over for all of the ecosystems. Still, a considerable number of developers continue to have wide scale financial success on iOS and few seem to crow about similar good fortune on Android. iOS first continues to be the dominant strategy despite the much wider net that Android casts. If you've got data or even a few anecdotal examples to counter that I haven't seen any lately, at all.RobertR said:I think there was an implication earlier in the thread that developers were going to be so turned off by "fragmentation issues" that it would inhibit them from developing apps. I'm just saying I don't see evidence of that.
Good is the enemy of great =)ManW_TheUncool said:Personally, I agree w/ Hanson (and have said this all along). There just aren't really that many apps that are truly worthwhile and must-have, IMHO. I have an iPad3, had a GS3 (and wife and son have GN2 and GS4), and now also an iPhone (from my company), and I don't really use that many different apps outside of the basics -- and pretty much all of them have decent-to-solid alternatives in both ecosystems.
_Man_