I’d say where by “anti-competitive” he means “competitive”. But I must say, I didn’t see this coming, and it’s a very clever solution to the mobile patent corner Google had painted itself into.
As is often the case, John Gruber nails the situation with just a few words that the Fandroids miss (or ignore outright).
"Don't be evil," my ass.
Apple users buy 61% more apps, paying 14% more per app.I think there are a few possible reasons for this, having both an iPhone and Android phone.
1. I think the speed of the app discovery process and smoothness/clean-ness of the download install process on the iPhone make people 61% more willing to try out things on a whim.
2. I think people might pay more because the apps are a bit cleaner, slightly less spam, cleaner advertising (when there is advertising) and maybe even "slightly" better due to the policing by Apple. As an app developer, the policing is a pain, but on balance, it probably does benefit users, and I think it's showing up here in customers being willing to pay 14% more per app, on average.
The appetite for cool software is increasing, and customers are willing to pay more for it
So the very reasons which are driving developers to spread their bets across all and any new platforms should indicate the potential for new platforms and the sustainability of small platforms. The thesis that one dominant platform wins the mobile “war” is naive. The post-PC era will be a multi-platform era. Developers already understand this. Platform vendors know this. It’s time to unlearn the lessons of the PC era.
Thank goodness.
when you build a piece of technology you get to put a lot of work into it – software and hardware – to make it natural and obvious and easy to use for a human being. Then you have priced the human being at the top of the chain. If you simply put in every feature in the world and every ability and let the human being modify their normalness to learn how to use it, you place the technology higher, as the master, and the human being more as a slave.
...THIS is what differentiates iOS from Android. Apple's competitors design around features with little to no out-of-the-box human use cases supported. Apple, however, does it the other way around.
When looking at the guys comparing tablets, the iPad guy looks happy. The Android tablet guy looks like the typical angry OS-warrior....an all-too common trait of Android Fanboys that nowadays make Guy Kawasaki's troops look tame. They're all too-ready to piss in your Cheerios.
No comment on the annoyed guy in the middle stuck with his pen and paper.
Since the apps of interest are from the same company, they should have the same user interface standard, even if the iPhone versions and the Android versions are developed by different people. But why do they look so different? Is it because iPhone developers are better at user interface design? Is it because the iPhone development environment is better than the Android’s? Is it because iPhone users care more about user interface? Or is it because Android itself implants the ignorance of beauty, usability and focus on details into the community at the first place?
Yes.
(follow the link above for the examples)
Word on the street is that AT&T hasn’t enabled the higher speed HSDPA+ radios on the Androids but since Apple controls the iPhone firmware, AT&T can’t mess with it.
This is a critical flaw with the Android ecosystem. The carriers can still f*** with you any way they want.
And they will.
From Daring Fireball:
"ViewSonic’s own promotional image for the product shows it running, of all things, a slightly-disguised screenshot of Mac OS X."
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/08/viewsonic-viewpad
First off: Android 1.6 is not meant for tablets.
Second: Windows 7 is not meant for fingers. Despite the "touch-friendly" features built in, all UI controls are designed for mouse cursors.
Probably the the most ridiculous of all the problems with ViewSonic's release is that the screenshot (http://media.marketwire.com/attachments/201103/MOD-41377_ViewPad10frontscreen... shows it running Mac OS X, which it obviously can't and won't do.
These guys are hacks and frauds.
Android has two major technical UX problems: animation performance and touch responsiveness.
Android’s UX architecture needs work. UI compositing and the view system are both primarily done in software. Garbage collection and async operations frequently block UI rendering.
Android team members are still in denial on the importance of GPU acceleration. They recommend eliminating garbage collection to improve animation performance. They say drawing isn’t the bottleneck and GPU accelerated 2D drawing won’t yield good results:
It's interesting that Google's decision to include garbage collection was a decision of developer convenience over end-user experience. To me, that's typical IT engineer thinking.
Another interesting tidbit: iOS lacks garbage collection (supposedly) because of its effect on battery performance. An equally interesting effect is that many new iOS developers believe that Objective-C lacks garbage collection, when it's only Cocoa-Touch that lacks it, not Cocoa.
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