Google Android

character

character

状元
mikelove said:
They'll enforce it the same way they've blocked a lot of pre-3.0 Android tablets - by withholding Google app / Android Market access.
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I wonder what was behind that decision -- was it to clear a space for Chromium OS? IMO it was definitely a case of Google being, if not evil, then clueless. Playing games with the Market seems to have gotten Amazon and Verizon interested in making their own Markets. Google's done such a crap job of running the Market they should just sell it to Amazon, but they might not be able to because the revenue sharing agreements with the carriers; the revenues Amazon could keep from the Market might be too low to be worthwhile.

I think the solution is not more games with the Market directly, but establishing different Google-approved certifications of Android, with specific requirements hardware makers/carriers would have to meet to be able to say their device was, for example "Google Android Tablet 2011 Certified". That could mean no third-party skins that couldn't be removed, OS updates hitting the device within 90 days of the new OS version being released, OS updates provided for at least 2 years, the device meeting certain minimum processor/memory/graphics requirements, etc. It would be annoying, but it still leaves Android open, and at the same time lets Google make Android more appealing to consumers.
 
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westmeadboy

榜眼
character said:
I wonder what was behind that decision
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In a word "carriers", as you hinted. The ridiculous situation where you need a sim card (from one of the paid-app countries and even if you are connecting via Wi-Fi) to see/download paid apps can only be there because of the carriers. Without the carriers on board, Android would not have been the huge success that it has been, so I wouldn't really say it was a clueless decision.

Anyway, if it's a case of Google being evil, then what word do you use for other companies (hello Apple and Microsoft) who enforce far tighter controls?
 
character

character

状元
westmeadboy said:
The ridiculous situation where you need a sim card (from one of the paid-app countries and even if you are connecting via Wi-Fi) to see/download paid apps can only be there because of the carriers.
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http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/market-filters.html "Not all users can see paid apps. To show paid apps, a device must have a SIM card and be running Android 1.1 or later, and it must be in a country (as determined by SIM carrier) in which paid apps are available." Thanks; I didn't know that. So the Market is a creature of the carriers; seems like a strategic blunder of Google's to let that happen. That makes an Amazon Android store much more appealing.

Without the carriers on board, Android would not have been the huge success that it has been [...]
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Android's been a success in the US because the iPhone's been exclusive to AT&T, and there was no other competitive smartphone offering, WebOS having been mismanaged. I've heard the iPhone is holding its own outside the US because it's not exclusive to one carrier, but haven't looked at the figures.

Anyway, if it's a case of Google being evil, then what word do you use for other companies (hello Apple and Microsoft) who enforce far tighter controls?
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The evil would come from hobbling a popular OS to promote a different one which was more aligned with the mission of Google selling you and me and everyone to advertisers.

Aside: what happens in this advertising-based economy when marketers know everything about us and decide some of us are not sufficiently motivated by ads to be worth subsidizing? Am I suddenly cut off from Gmail, CNN.com, etc? :wink:
 
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sui.generis

探花
mikelove said:
Having worked there myself (in the WM group, no less) I can say from personal experience that Microsoft is incredibly paranoid about the Windows/Office monopoly - they won't even allow their own office products for other platforms to compete with Office on Windows. I can't imagine even Microsoft Office on WP7 will ever be allowed to approach iWork / QuickOffice / DocsToGo features-wise; they absolutely do not want people doing real Office document editing on their low-royalty-rate mobile device, they don't mind you viewing / making small corrections to documents on-the-go but if you ask for a "real" version of Office for WP7 their response will be to laugh in your face and tell you to buy a netbook (running Windows 7 and Office 2010 and netting Microsoft an order of magnitude more money than your phone).
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I had assumed it was just laziness and mobile incompetence, hadn't even considered that ^. I wonder if that will show in their app approval process.

It's certainly consistent with their other practices -- leveraging DirectX to push Vista adoption for example. IE9 and the new live essentials cutting off XP while it's still half the install base are similar examples IMO, not as blatant though.

Fortunately, game makers do care what install bases are. Other than MS's baby Halo 2, I have yet to come across a game I care about that requires one of the higher direct x versions that I've been cut off from.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
sui.generis said:
I had assumed it was just laziness and mobile incompetence, hadn't even considered that ^. I wonder if that will show in their app approval process.
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That's going to be fascinating to watch, actually - this will probably be the first mobile platform since iOS for which rejections are widespread enough / infuriating enough to those on the receiving end of them that we'll see significant coverage of them in the (tech) media. They'll have to tread very carefully if they want to start rejecting competitive office apps, though, particularly as Apple seems to have considerably loosened up about apps-that-are-similar-to-first-party-ones in the last few months.
 
T

toledo

Member
sui.generis said:
I just discovered an iphone app being ported to android that delivers a fuller OneNote Mobile experience than the actual OneNote mobile even dreams of.
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Sorry for a bit of offtopic, but can you please provide a link to such application?
 
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sui.generis

探花
I am glad iPhone users are finally getting the power to consume some flash with Skyfire, and demand has set the heavens ablaze. Despite the pricetag when most platforms get skyfire for free at the user level (income coming from google and perhaps with potential for a manufacturer to pick it up as a default browser). Typically, apps are cheaper on the iPhone than elsewhere because of volume expectations as well as the culturally ingrained $.99 effect. Given the sellouts, I hope skyfire raises the price so that their iphone congestion to dollar earned ratio gets better.

Anyway, I just wanted to thank iPhone users for subsidizing every other platform's skyfire experience. That's very generous of you. :D
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
sui.generis said:
I am glad iPhone users are finally getting the power to consume some flash with Skyfire, and demand has set the heavens ablaze. Despite the pricetag when most platforms get skyfire for free at the user level (income coming from google and perhaps with potential for a manufacturer to pick it up as a default browser). Typically, apps are cheaper on the iPhone than elsewhere because of volume expectations as well as the culturally ingrained $.99 effect. Given the sellouts, I hope skyfire raises the price so that their iphone congestion to dollar earned ratio gets better.
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A more pro-iPhone spin on this would be to say that after making the move to iPhone, Skyfire saw their revenues explode compared to what they'd been earning on other platforms, thus confirming that iPhone is still far and away the most profitable platform for mobile ISVs.

But if you want to go handing out thank-yous to iPhone users, you could also thank them for funding the development of Pleco on Android, just as you could thank WM users for funding development on iPhone or Palm users for funding development on WM. (and this is not confined to Pleco, of course - DocsToGo begets DocsToGo, Epocrates begets Epocrates, etc)
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Zeldor said:
You should be happy that you don't have win7 version out

http://www.slashgear.com/windows-phone- ... -12113904/
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Indeed, though I don't know if the situation is that much better on a rooted Android phone - at least on Android it's theoretically possible to use native ARM code (which we'll be doing heavily), which is much much less receptive to decompiling than CIL or Java bytecode. Hopefully this will help persuade Microsoft to open up native-code development to all developers and not just "chosen" ones.
 
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Izmahoby

Member
I just installed the Nciku Android Dictionary http://www.nciku.com/tool/androiddictionary

While it is a just a dictionary, no flash cards, stroke order, etc - it is a functional Android Dictionary, so more than a little better than carrying around my old WM device for this and if like the website, is much more comprehensive than even the most expensive Plecodict package. Furthermore, my Android device has Chinese hand writing input (via the Chinese keyboard & HWR apk) and voice input, making one of the initial reason for buying the WM version less important.

If the bells and whistles that come with the Pleco dictionary are causing any delay in this first release I suggest removing for now and get the product out before too many more competitors appear.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Izmahoby said:
I just installed the Nciku Android Dictionary http://www.nciku.com/tool/androiddictionary

While it is a just a dictionary, no flash cards, stroke order, etc - it is a functional Android Dictionary, so more than a little better than carrying around my old WM device for this and if like the website, is much more comprehensive than even the most expensive Plecodict package. Furthermore, my Android device has Chinese hand writing input (via the Chinese keyboard & HWR apk) and voice input, making one of the initial reason for buying the WM version less important.

If the bells and whistles that come with the Pleco dictionary are causing any delay in this first release I suggest removing for now and get the product out before too many more competitors appear.
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Honestly I'm just not that worried - there were a zillion competitors on iOS when we launched (even two that included the ABC dictionary) and we're still doing extremely well on that; if anything I wish we'd waited longer and released our first iOS version with a few more features, the lack of fully-integrated, properly-sorted English-Chinese fulltext search really cost us a lot of early buzz (there were some early negative reviews that correctly pointed out that our free app's English search capabilities lagged behind those of several others).

As far as nciku specifically, they seem to use the same dictionary in their mobile apps that we give away for free in our basic iPhone app (and plan to give away for free in our basic Android app) and they haven't yet added any more bells and whistles to their iPhone apps after quite a few months of availability, so while they certainly bear watching I'm inclined to think that they intend to keep most of their content online-only - the mobile app is probably just a way of getting a little more revenue off of that dictionary license.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Oh, and basic Chinese handwriting support has been built into iOS pretty much since day one but that hasn't stopped fullscreen handwriting from being our best-selling add-on (though OCR's likely to overtake it within a week or two) - nowdays, on iPhone and Android anybody with a copy of CC-CEDICT and a rudimentary knowledge of SQLite can toss together a Chinese dictionary in a few weeks and have something with an awful lot of the features from our old Palm/WM apps (or at least the dictionary portions of them), so if we can't provide value beyond that then there's not really any reason for us to still be in this business.
 
H

haraldalbrecht

探花
Mike, I'm really glad to see that you finally changed your opinion on Android support. As I possess currently two Android devices (a mobile phone and a tablet) this is a good thing to see. While I perfectly understand your need to protect your business. I as your customer felt alienated by your reasoning. I could not and still cannot understand many of your arguments.

Well, I'm now looking forward for what will evolve and would be really happy if I could transfer. My old PalmOs license to my androids. I will accept a reasonable transfer fee -- whatever reasonable may mean (grin). Since I own now two devices, do you have any idea on licensing help so I don't need to pay through my nose?

With best regards,
Harald
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
haraldalbrecht said:
Mike, I'm really glad to see that you finally changed your opinion on Android support. As I possess currently two Android devices (a mobile phone and a tablet) this is a good thing to see. While I perfectly understand your need to protect your business. I as your customer felt alienated by your reasoning. I could not and still cannot understand many of your arguments.
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Thanks! Though I still stand by a lot of what I said, and I'm still very nervous that even the parts I'm not so sure about will be proven to be prescient - the rise in app store fragmentation makes me feel a bit better about the likelihood of phones blocking non-Google-approved apps at least, though.

And fragmentation / hardware compatibility issues are probably going to prevent us from delivering quite as nice an experience on Android as we do on iPhone in some respects, try though we might - the handwriting recognizer for example probably won't have as buttery-smooth a stroke capture pad as it does on iPhone, since the OpenGL implementation on HTC devices is buggy / inconsistent in how it handles background buffers and as a consequence of that it seems like we'll have to use plain old non-accelerated graphics to draw pen strokes. (HTC's cavalier attitude towards compatibility issues has been a thorn in our sides since the early WM days...)

Actually my best recent statement on my feelings on Android in general was probably one I made in a Forumosa post:

http://forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=90739&start=30#p1225078

Basically, I still don't like it at all myself, but I do like the fact that other people like it since it's nice not to have Pleco's entire survival dependent on the good graces of a single company.

haraldalbrecht said:
Well, I'm now looking forward for what will evolve and would be really happy if I could transfer. My old PalmOs license to my androids. I will accept a reasonable transfer fee -- whatever reasonable may mean (grin). Since I own now two devices, do you have any idea on licensing help so I don't need to pay through my nose?
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The two devices may be problematic - we weren't able to do much of anything for people in that situation on iPhone. And honestly, even if the situation is a bit looser on Android I think we ought to try to be consistent about how many devices you can use a platform-transferred copy on rather than giving people on one platform a better deal than people on another one.

The real question is whether both of your devices will be able to run our Android version; we haven't made any decisions about hardware requirements yet, but we're holding open the possibility that we might require Android 3.0 as a minimum if Google changes the UI radically enough that it's difficult to support both that and 2.x without a major rewrite. (really would be nice if they'd actually release some information / guidance on that...) We did something like this on iPhone - required the latest version 3.0 of iOS at the time we launched and refused to support 2.0 in spite of the fact that a lot of people were still on 2.0 - and it worked out very well for us, we were able to rely on some useful things Apple added in 3.0 to make our software better and get it to market faster.
 
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haraldalbrecht

探花
Well, I don't think that Android 3 (or 2.3?) will be a major part of the version game. One of my Androids is an HTC Legend on 2.1 ... But the update to 2.2 seems to have started at least in parts. The other device is a Samsung Galaxy tablet already on 2.2. I'm sure that I won't get 2.3 on them at all. These devices are already pretty decent and good workhorses.

As for the two devices I do understand. But I think that having only a single device is a thing of the past. I also see the problem of simultaneous usage ... which does not apply in my case as these two devices are strict personal devices.
 
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