Pleco: iOS 9, Android M, and feature parity

[etm001]

Hi,

Mike, you could you note any benefits either Android M or iOS 9 offer in regards to Pleco functionality and/or effects on cross-platform feature parity? Are there any areas in which one platform is outshining the other, and thus allowing Pleco to offer functionality not available on the other platform (or at least, allowing a better implementation of the functionality, etc.)? I ask because I read the post about Android Screen OCR / + Reader, which I thought was really cool. As you noted in that post, there are no equivalent APIs in iOS that allow for this (although you did note that the upcoming iOS App Extension, etc., will improve the user experience on the iOS side too).

Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

Android has screen OCR / reader / clipboard monitoring, iOS has more document reader formats (web / ePub / DOC / DOCX / RTF) - Android may be able to access those via third party apps with Screen Reader/OCR, but native support is better - and iCloud sync/backup of history / flashcards. Also, while we're about to add support for Google's newly Mandarin/Cantonese-equipped free TTS engine, the one on iOS is better since it lets you follow along with texts word-by-word.

iOS generally has a more refined UI, since it's easier to make a refined UI on iOS with fewer devices to support (and better system UI frameworks) - much better experience on iPad, e.g., almost every screen in our iOS app is tablet-optimized while on Android we pretty much only optimize the main dictionary search screen. This also means that close-to-the-hardware features like OCR tend to run better on iOS since we have fewer devices to optimize around.

Android gets minor updates faster because we can push them out instantly (no App Review wait), iOS gets major updates faster because it's much easier to do native code development on iOS and so when we want to iterate / debug a big new addition that's a much better platform to do it on.

But overall the gap is narrowing rapidly now - personally, I still think iOS offers a much better experience than Android in general (not to mention a more secure one - the same openness that allows for those new features makes Android a very leaky ship in terms of security vulnerabilities) and wouldn't view those new features as sufficient justification for favoring Android, but I could certainly imagine that for some people the value of Screen Reader would be sufficient to overcome those other disadvantages.

 

[etm001]

Thanks Mike for the detailed feedback. At the moment I'm firmly in the Apple camp (rMBP, iPhone, iPad), but I'm always tempted by Android's customizability (excluding jailbreaking iOS). My iPad Air 2 is overkill for running Pleco, but it's such a fluid experience that, despite being able to sell the iPad for $$$ and getting a cheap Android tablet, I haven't been able to bring myself to sell it. And with the new iOS 9 features (e.g., PIP, Split View, Slide Over, etc.), I think the overall experience will be even better (e.g., watching a video with subtitles and having Pleco open to look up words).

 

[mikelove]

Yeah, forgot to mention split-screen - Samsung's had that for years, but it's perpetually buggy, and supported by fewer apps than iOS' solution will be a week after it launches. Should allow for a form of clipboard monitoring too - there was a bug in iOS 9 Beta 1 that may or may not still be active which prevented the secondary app from receiving clipboard change notifications, but even without that we can simply poll it for changes with relatively little performance impact.

Android tablets are a bleak and unprofitable business; iPad volumes may be declining but the margins at least are still excellent and it's unlikely Apple will be abandoning or downscaling their tablet efforts anytime soon. (I love my Air 2 as well, was wary of the larger screen after years with Mini's but it was well worth the change) Google hasn't done much of anything to help the situation in the last few Android releases - if anything with Lollipop they nudged people back in the direction of Activities over Fragments, which is effectively encouraging one-panel phone UIs over multi-panel tablet ones.

So yeah, on tablets the iOS advantage both in Pleco and platform-wide is substantially larger than on phones, and thanks to iCloud if you want an Apple tablet you'll probably be better off with an iPhone too. That being said, the price difference is also more dramatic - Android tablets are really, really cheap - so if you are primarily interested in using Pleco and aren't bothered by a less polished experience and a more phone-like UI then I certainly can see that being justifiable too.