Windows Phone

[Loriquero]

My devices right now are a Xiaomi 3 and a Surface 2. I do love the don´t-call-me-metro-experience, but I don´t think I´ll be stop buying Android smartphones anytime soon and start buying WP just because two main reasons: Google apps and Pleco... Is just hard for me to live a life without Google´s ecosystem and of course witouth Pleco.

For the surface, I love having a real Microsoft office suite in a "almost tablet sized laptop" with wonderful battery life. Plus, all the chinese main apps are there. the 必应词典 developed by Microsoft Asia is a good dictionary (but not pinyin because is chinese oriented) and I don't feel I really need Pleco dictionaries there because I always have my cellphone with me. The think I really miss in the Surface is the Pleco reader. And I'm willing to spend some bucks in the windows store if I find a solution similar to the Pleco reader in there, even if is just feed by free dictionaries. So if Mr. Love or any other developer can make this happen in the windows store, you will have my eternal gratitude and my money.

About WP sales, it seems like 2014 is gonna be the year WP surpass iOS in global sales; the trend is there and I think there is not coming back. Developers like Mr. Love just need to know besides of hardware sales there is also apps sales. If microsoft proves they are nearly similar as in iOS, developers are going to jump in. I hope Microsoft can pull it off.

 

[mikelove]

Honestly it's not even enough that WP would have to make us money, it's that one of the other platforms we develop for now would have to collapse.

We're short on time, not on revenue-making opportunities - if we hadn't supported Android and had invested all of that time / money into adding more functionality to our iOS app, I suspect we'd be in about the same place we are now revenue/profit-wise. Android is a good insurance policy against an Apple collapse / policy change, and it's popular enough that it also does us a lot of good in terms of getting our brand more widely distributed, but from the standpoint of simply making money it hasn't really done a whole lot for us, and personally I'd much rather be working on new features than on re-implementing the same old features on another platform.

So given that we're not interested in WP as a revenue expansion tool, supporting it really only makes sense if iOS sales implode (thus forcing us to look elsewhere for revenues) or Android sales implode (thus forcing us to look elsewhere for that insurance policy). Neither scenario is very likely, though.

The former would pretty much require an epic failure on Apple's part - Microsoft isn't going to be able to lure away a critical mass of iOS users, they'd have to be pushed - and even if that happened I'm inclined to think that most of the fleeing Apple customers would end up in the hands of Google or Amazon or Samsung rather than Microsoft simply on the strength of their combined technical and marketing muscle. And Android's openness and diversity mean that we don't really need an insurance policy if most of our revenues end up coming from it instead of from iOS - an Apple collapse in Android's favor would most likely leave us Android-only.

As for the latter scenario, that would require Microsoft to somehow convince a whole bunch of Chinese OEMs to trade in an open-source OS that they can customize to their heart's content for a closed-source one controlled by a not-very-trustworthy American company, so it's barely even worth considering unless something wacky happens like Baidu or Huawei buying out Microsoft's OS business.

Oh, and "global sales" are a thoroughly meaningless statistic - until 2010, iOS ranked behind BlackBerry, but nobody's arguing that we'd have been better off supporting BlackBerry. An awful lot of people don't really care what OS their phone is running and aren't actively choosing one or the other, and those people don't tend to buy a lot of apps - the fact that Microsoft managed to lure a few of them away from Android with cheap fire-sale Nokias doesn't demonstrate anything except Microsoft's desperation.

 

[eee]

Hi Mike,

I totally get your disinterest or even negative view on Windows Phone and Windows in general. I have been trying to migrate to Android and Chromebook and rid myself of Windows completely but realized that I really do need the Adobe Creative Suite, so I bought a Surface Pro 2 which I use as my main device.

Surprisingly, it replaces a tablet and laptop both, and can be docked to become a desktop. I still have a Note 8 and a Samsung Galaxy phone on which I run Pleco. Since there are so many nice Nokia phones now, and since they're really the leaders in mobile photography now, I've been contemplating switching to Nokia's 1020 successor this Summer.

When I try to think which Android apps I'd miss, I come up with Google Maps and possibly Google Music and Drive and Keep... and Pleco. Since Pleco is what helped me get through a year in a Chinese university, all classes taught in Mandarin, I know how important this app is to me and wouldn't leave Android without it. Or I would have to carry my old Samsung phone just for the dictionary evven after I upgrade.

However, I really want to suggest that you take a second look at Windows. I used to hate it but now it's just such a breath of fresh air except for a lack of apps. But Phone and RT will soon be able to run the same apps, starting with Update 1 in April, which means you get access to phones, tablets and all Windows 8 desktops just by making a single Windows version of Pleco! I would certainly love this - to have Pleco on all my devices including my work device.

There's so many use cases I can think of, especially since I'm a publisher. I just read about a new app for scanning documents called Office Lens, which integrates with MS's really excellent OCR from OneNote... http://www.engadget.com/2014/02/22/windows-phones-office-lens-app-wants-to-replace-your-scanner/

It would really be next-level note-taking and transcription. What do you think about Pleco and Windows?

 

[mikelove]

Honestly, I don't have much to add to my earlier arguments, except that:

1) My daughter is about to turn 1 and I'm even more reluctant now to take on new projects that might distract me from her, and
2) The process of porting 3.0 back to Android has reminded me just how unplesant porting is.

1) is an argument to which there's really no possible counter absent an existential threat to Pleco (which this isn't), and it also exacerbates 2) since the only thing worse than spending time away from her working is spending time away from her working on something I don't even enjoy.

 

[denmitch]

Pleco now hiring Porting geek.
Just kidding!

 

[mikelove]

If only... porting is especially hard to farm out because we still have quite a bit of low-level code that was written by yours truly back in the Palm days; don't have to do much with it on an ongoing basis (ordinarily - actually did have to rewrite one big chunk of it for 3.0 thanks to some custom-font-related address space issues) but tons of work anytime we want to do a new port.

 

[alex_hk90]

If only... porting is especially hard to farm out because we still have quite a bit of low-level code that was written by yours truly back in the Palm days; don't have to do much with it on an ongoing basis (ordinarily - actually did have to rewrite one big chunk of it for 3.0 thanks to some custom-font-related address space issues) but tons of work anytime we want to do a new port.

Out of interest, what language is that code written in that it can still be used for Android and iOS?

 

[mikelove]

Straight C. (though we've organized it to be somewhat object-oriented, passing a pointer to an object as the first parameter of most functions)

 

[Shun]

But on the upside, once the Android port of low-level code is done, and the platform-specific code is in place, most future capabilities of Pleco will be easy to port between iOS and Android, will they not?

 

[mikelove]

Depends on the particular capabilities - much of what we did in 3.0 was platform-specific (new UI / typography, new document reader file types) and much of what we're planning for the future is as well (various OCR refinements, flashcard UI changes / new test modes).

Each platform also needs about 1-2 months of programmer time per year to keep up with evolutions to its APIs / basic UI design / etc; iOS accumulated a ton of those after we'd neglected it to do our Android port, and Android has quite a few of them that we're going through now; since these take a similar amount of time per platform but iOS is generating a lot more money for us than Android, the end result is that in order to keep any kind of momentum in Android development we have to dramatically over-allocate resources to it.

 

[Shun]

I see. At least things like preparing new dictionaries should be quite easy to outsource.

 

[j0_0hn]

Bummer. Came here hoping that the announcement of universal Windows apps may see a Pleco app on the cards before my exchange to Nanjing. Guess not.

Glad it's for a worthy cause though (your daughter).

 

[mikelove]

Sadly no - royalty-free WP licensing does have me feeling like scenario #2 in my earlier post (Android implosion) is a bit more possible, though. It's going to be very interesting to see what happens this fall - a direct attack by Apple on what remains of the Android high end (through the large-screen iPhone 6) combined with a strengthened Microsoft attack on the low end and a potential threat from Amazon in the middle is going to cause a lot of sleepless nights in Mountain View.

 

[Loriquero]

Sadly no - royalty-free WP licensing does have me feeling like scenario #2 in my earlier post (Android implosion) is a bit more possible, though. It's going to be very interesting to see what happens this fall - a direct attack by Apple on what remains of the Android high end (through the large-screen iPhone 6) combined with a strengthened Microsoft attack on the low end and a potential threat from Amazon in the middle is going to cause a lot of sleepless nights in Mountain View.

You seem pleased about that scenario

 

[mikelove]

Not pleased - we've put enough work into Android that we'd really like to have our business carry on successfully on both platforms - but of the two, it would be my preference if for no other reason than because we're making a lot more money on iOS at the moment.

That being said, declining sales plus rumblings from Microsoft's new CEO have most observers calling Windows Phone pretty much dead at this point, so neither scenario seems especially likely now.

Apple could still screw up in some colossal, business-destroying way, e.g. with some sort of disastrous hardware flaw in the iPhone 6, and on the other side of things, while Android doesn't really have a single point of failure, most of our Android sales come from a relatively small % of users with mostly high-end phones, and if Apple manages to lure a lot of those people away with the iPhone 6, we could find our Android revenues dropping greatly even while Android as a platform remains strong and its market share remains steady. But if Apple went out of business we'd probably end up Android-only rather than Android + WP (maybe we'd start playing around with a web app or something), and if our Android revenues dropped greatly, the devices would still be out there so we'd probably carry on supporting Android but simply invest less time into it.

 

[alex_hk90]

Not pleased - we've put enough work into Android that we'd really like to have our business carry on successfully on both platforms - but of the two, it would be my preference if for no other reason than because we're making a lot more money on iOS at the moment.

That being said, declining sales plus rumblings from Microsoft's new CEO have most observers calling Windows Phone pretty much dead at this point, so neither scenario seems especially likely now.

Apple could still screw up in some colossal, business-destroying way, e.g. with some sort of disastrous hardware flaw in the iPhone 6, and on the other side of things, while Android doesn't really have a single point of failure, most of our Android sales come from a relatively small % of users with mostly high-end phones, and if Apple manages to lure a lot of those people away with the iPhone 6, we could find our Android revenues dropping greatly even while Android as a platform remains strong and its market share remains steady. But if Apple went out of business we'd probably end up Android-only rather than Android + WP (maybe we'd start playing around with a web app or something), and if our Android revenues dropped greatly, the devices would still be out there so we'd probably carry on supporting Android but simply invest less time into it.

As a current Android user I can't see myself ever being lured away by Apple - even RIM would be more likely.

 

[mikelove]

Oh I know there are quite a few people who would never give up Android, but just in general users' platform loyalties seem more fickle than they were a few years ago. (as evidenced by an increase in both iOS-to-Android and Android-to-iOS platform switchers)

Some of that may relate to it simply being easier to move between platforms than it used to be, but I suspect a good deal of it may come from changes in people's attitudes towards Apple versus Google - back in 2010 or 2011 we'd get maybe 1-2 emails a week that mentioned avoiding iOS because they felt Apple was creepy / monopolistic / evil in some way, but it seems like either Apple's reputation has improved or Google's has suffered because we don't really hear much of anything about that anymore - very few people migrating to Android these days for conscience-related reasons.

 

[alex_hk90]

Oh I know there are quite a few people who would never give up Android, but just in general users' platform loyalties seem more fickle than they were a few years ago. (as evidenced by an increase in both iOS-to-Android and Android-to-iOS platform switchers)

Some of that may relate to it simply being easier to move between platforms than it used to be, but I suspect a good deal of it may come from changes in people's attitudes towards Apple versus Google - back in 2010 or 2011 we'd get maybe 1-2 emails a week that mentioned avoiding iOS because they felt Apple was creepy / monopolistic / evil in some way, but it seems like either Apple's reputation has improved or Google's has suffered because we don't really hear much of anything about that anymore - very few people migrating to Android these days for conscience-related reasons.

I'd be happy to give up Android for something better if it comes along - just don't see this ever being iOS.

 

[mikelove]

But that's based on iOS' features / design rather than any inherent objection to Apple?

 

[alex_hk90]

But that's based on iOS' features / design rather than any inherent objection to Apple?

A bit of both, probably more on the whole obsession with control that Apple exhibits. As a software developer I like to be able to customise my devices, and Apple always seem intent on making that difficult (especially with iOS). Google / Android seem more friendly with the open-source community in general. I don't really have any objectives on the data collection / spying angle (both Apple and Google are guilty of that, though you can probably avoid it more on Android if you really cared that much). Similarly I used to object to Apple suing everyone with their ridiculous patents (rounded square with screen, icons in grid pattern!?) but I know that others have now followed suit (no pun intended). And I guess the blame should at least partly fall with those granting said patents.