[clug] Android in the Business Press

[Alex Satrapa]

On 13/05/2010, at 18:05 , Michael Still wrote:

> I'd be interested in a survey of the percentage of iPhones which are jail broken on the other hand -- that's got to be an indicator of people who like to tinker with products they purchase.

Didn't some guy in Sydney do that "jailbroken iPhones" survey just recently?  ;)

But estimates from "pundits" are that between 8 and 12 percent of iPhones are jailbroken.  My opinion (based on the SSH worm) is that most of whom don't have the nouse to change the default password for the SSH daemon.  So these aren't people who are *tinkering* these are people doing the iPhone equivalent of wearing a Che Guavera t-shirt when they haven't got a clue who Che was or what Communism is (classic quote: "Che Guavera t-shirts worn by middle class teenage rebels that Che would have shot in an instant").  Not only are iPhone users more likely to spend money on stuff, they're also (sadly) more likely to be gormless trend-followers.

Not that I have any firm opinion on the matter, but being an iPhone user myself I'm often overwhelmed with feelings of self-loathing. Kinda like the guy who has a Che Guavera T-shirt as a protest against the establishment, but won't wear it for fear of being associated with aforementioned clueless rebels (it's a metaphor, I don't really have a T-shirt celebrating the life of a ruthless killer).

As far as *tinkering* on the iPhone goes, you're better off looking at the folks who downloaded the SDK and actually wrote something more than "Hello World". Pay the $99 fee, sell 100 apps at $1 each, and your tinkering will pay for itself (or don't pay the fee, and stick to tinkering with software on the iPhone emulator).  I don't agree with the restriction on not publishing code, but apart from that the Android store is going to have to be more like the iTunes store - without editorial control they're going to end up being the Windows of the phone world, where the first piece of software you have to load on an Android phone is a malware detector, and half your processor speed (and more importantly for a portable computer, battery life) is consumed by that software.

There is such a thing as too much freedom, especially if it comes with the power to control things you don't understand.

Alex