[clug] Android in the Business Press

[Alex Satrapa]

On 14/05/2010, at 11:41 , Hal wrote:

> On 05/14/2010 10:58 AM, Alex Satrapa wrote:
>> 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.
> Che was a middle class rebel who liked killing and f**king and found that ideology, (whatever else it was or wasn't), was really useful to let him do rather a lot of it. He took particular pleasure in killing unarmed prisoners without trial on whim, pulling the trigger himself.

Preaching to the choir brother, preaching to the choir.

> Shame you need a mac & OSX to do that. Iphone & Ipad are the most closed general purpose, software eco-systems ever (games consoles might be worse).



> You must pay apple before you can start, you must pay apple to make your application available to others

If by "pay before you start" you mean "buy a computer" - doesn't the same apply to any development environment?

> , you must pay apple, what is it? 30% of your *revenue* (makes govt. tax look cheap in comparsion) and apple can destroy you for any reason (including reasons that should be stopped by the ACCC) at any time or indeed, no reason at all. And they do this arbitrarily and regularly.

Arbitrarily perhaps. They have reversed some no-go decisions after the rejections have been called into question.

As for regularly: you hear a lot about the rejections that do happen because the people that are "arbitrarily rejected" make a lot of noise about it.

As for profit share: ask a farmer how much of the Woolworths/Coles shelf price they're getting for their pork or beef. It's a lot less than 70%. There's nothing stopping disgruntled developers porting their applications to Android and selling them on that platform. What's the profit share for Android apps? 30%, just like the Apple store. Not only can the Android market remove your app from the Market, they can also remotely remove that app from Android customers who've previously purchased your app.

> It's software and business, not murder so saying it's like Che is silly.

Do people who wear Che Guavera t-shirts understand what they're doing (beyond the obvious "f— you" to their parents of course)? I doubt it. Do people who jailbreak their iPhones understand what they're doing?

How many people's lives will be harmed by someone wearing a Che Guavera t-shirt? How many people's lives will be harmed by someone hosting malware on the Internet?

> However, "There's an apple-tax for that."
> Bill Gates and Steve Balmer are saints with halos compared to apple policies.

They reserve the right to remotely terminate your Windows XP licence for any reason. That's a little more extreme than rejecting your app from the iTunes App Store isn't it?

> The only thing that saves us from apple's evil intent is their low market share.

Because selling people the highest quality user interface and rigidly enforcing the dress code is Evil?

> Open platforms with competition among applications is the only way forward.

Open platforms that don't have editorial control will all end up hosting Flash apps. There will be nothing to distinguish WebOS from Android from Microsoft Windows Phone, they'll all just be running Flash and competing on price. Any differentiation at the OS level in eg: geolocation, peer-to-peer communications, multitasking, etc will fall by the wayside since it will be Flash applications that developers are writing, not Android applications.

> The Nokia N900 is a lovely, lovely phone and a lot of hardware for A$650. I love mine. The SDK is free. ... If only it could get the market share to make it a useful target for commerical devs as well as people like us. I suppose Android has a shot.

So promote the Nokia N900 by writing some apps to do things that you want to do! The longer you wait for someone else to write the software for you, the more you encourage the market for iPhone apps.

Remember, all it takes for evil to prevail is for enough good men to do nothing.

Alex