[clug] Android in the Business Press

[Sam Couter]

Alex Satrapa <grail at goldweb.com.au> wrote:
> If by "pay before you start" you mean "buy a computer" - doesn't the same apply to any development environment?

Apple's iPhone SDK costs money and is non-free, GCC is both gratis and
libre.

> 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%.

Physical products which aren't yet finished and will spoil are a lot
different to software. I really don't mean to defend the big
supermarkets, but there's processing (Coles don't sell whole cows
but the farmer does), transport, storage, packaging, etc. Software can
go directly from the compiler output to the end user device, can be
duplicated infinitely and will never spoil. This isn't a fair
comparison.

> There's nothing stopping disgruntled developers porting their applications to Android and selling them on that platform.

Except that Apple says native code only, using a not exactly common
language and their proprietary APIs. When you say "port" you really mean
"re-write from scratch in a different language for a different platform".

> 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.

I believe Apple can do the same thing, and can disable the entire device
at will.

> Do people who jailbreak their iPhones understand what they're doing?

Yes, they're doing what they need to do to escape Apple's jail so they
can make their phone do whatever it is they want it to do that Apple
thinks they shouldn't be able to do even though they bought and paid for
their phone. It's ridiculous that people need to go to these lengths
simply to make their own hardware do what they want.

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

Pretty much. If I buy a piece of hardware it damn well better not have
artificial constraints on what I can do with it.

If Microsoft pulled the same stunts as Apple, people would be screaming
blue murder.

> 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.

So what? I hate the technology, but who am I to stop people from
installing Flash apps on the hardware they fully paid for? Apart from
being Flash, having a cross-platform environment is an awesome idea. I'd
prefer Java by a long shot, but it's had decades and hasn't made it yet.

Keeping platforms arbitrarily incompatible ultimately leads to a single
dominant platform (see: Windows) with an unbreakable strangling
monopoly. To support this is retarded unless you think your platform is
going to be The One, and then it's just pure anticompetitive evil. You
do seem to support this, so... either you own Apple shares and are evil,
or you're retarded.

> 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.

If a feature is compelling enough, developers will use it even if it
means writing a less portable native application. If those features and
native applications then become popular enough, the APIs for those
features will be added to Flash.

> 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.

I wholeheartedly agree, but this is only part of the picture. Apple
products don't succeed from technical superiority, because they're
functionally inferior to their competitors. Apple products succeed
because of their visual design, by setting fashion trends and people
generally being trend-following sheep. It's hard to beat that, and
writing superior software is only a very small part.
-- 
Sam Couter         |  mailto:sam at couter.id.au
OpenPGP fingerprint:  A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05  5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C
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