Android vs iPhone

[powerglide]

 

[Teo]

"det är så jevla bra med andråijd för man kan bara lägga in saker i den dIrEcKt från datårn". Jag får inte upp fanskapet på datorn jallafall. Som den är nu är den en bara en löjligt avancerad klocka med stor skärm i halvknackig kvalitet.

 

[powerglide]

Går det att ringa med den? :rolleyes

 

[Teo]

Går det att ringa med den? :rolleyes

Vet inte. Har inget simkort i för jag kommer bara ha den som lektelefon. Men att jag inte har simkort i borde väl knappas påverka möjligheterna att få upp den som usb-enhet?

 

[powerglide]

Apple på väg att bli för stort?
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/26/apple-will-one-day-rule-the-world/

The Decline Of Android Foretells The Rise Of A Total Apple Monopoly
MATT BURNSposted 9 hours ago61 Comments
We have always built and destroyed monopolies. Companies often start out good but slowly turn, for lack of a better word, evil. The twin dark stars of profit and market share bring even the kindest companies into a collision course with failure. I’d say Apple is headed down that road.

The company announced its 2012 Q2 earnings earlier this week and as MG pointed out, they’re nearly as impressive as the previous blockbuster quarter. A dive at wireless carrier’s financials shows that the iPhone accounted for a whopping 59% of smartphone sales in the U.S. last quarter. The iPhone 4S downright crushed a league of new Android flagship handsets. Android is faltering at the hands of the iPhone. Apple is on pace per some analysts to be the first trillion dollar company in history and will do so on the back of a trivial amount of products and services.

Apple’s success is made possible by keeping things simple. This started with the iMac’s one-size fits all mentality. Steve Jobs and Co. correctly identified that the average consumer doesn’t care about specs but rather capabilities. The spec has been dead at Apple for more than a decade. Where Dell, HP and the others target the average computer shopper, Apple looks to sell to their parents.

The same philosophy is driving the iPhone’s massive growth. There isn’t a better universal smartphone on the market. This isn’t open for discussion and the numbers prove it. Smartphones are now outselling less expensive feature phones with the iPhone as the number one seller. That states above all else that consumers overwhelmingly prefer Apple’s take on mobile phones. And for good reason.

I’m downright fed up with Android. Others must be with me. I’m ready to jump ship to the iPhone after being an Android user since the original Droid. Updates aren’t regular or useful and the vast fragmentation in hardware causes apps to be very inconsistent in quality. The only thing holding me back is Android’s workflow allowed by homescreen widgets. But the average consumer doesn’t care about workflow nonsense. They want a phone that works and they’re choosing the iPhone. And the iPad.

As dominating as the iPhone is to the mobile phone market, the iPad is even more so to the tablet market. The iPad is experiencing a crazy amount of growth due to the lack of true alternatives. Only the Amazon Kindle Fire offers any sort of competitive advantage but that’s only due to the $200 price tag. The Samsung Galaxy Tab is the main iPad alternative and according to a study released today, it only holds 15% of the Android tablet market. The Fire accounts for 50% of Android tablets and it doesn’t even show its Android skin.

This domination in two of the most important consumer electronic spaces — coupled by Apple’s astounding cash reserves and market valuation — is more frightening than Microsoft’s monopoly in the ’90s. There was a time when Microsoft was in a similar position. In fact there are several important parallels between Apple of today and Microsoft of yesteryear.

At the core of the U.S. Government’s case against Microsoft was that Windows users only had access to Internet Explorer. This came during the height of the browser wars when Netscape and Opera were trying to gain traction. Microsoft asserted that IE was a Windows 95 feature rather than a standalone product much like Apple states the App Store is part of iOS. The Department of Justice successfully argued against Microsoft in stating that it was too hard for consumers to choose a different browser due to the download speeds at the time. It is also nearly impossible for the average iPhone owner to find a different source of applications for their device.

However, these anecdotal points only paint half the picture. Consumers are willingly choosing the iPhone and iPad over a large assortment of similar competitors. Windows was the only option 15 years ago. Macs were, if you will, the BlackBerry of the day.

The computing world has changed drastically since the U.S. Government deemed Microsoft a monopoly and broke the company in two. The term personal computer is much less meaningful. It doesn’t just define a beige box sitting on a desk. Most agree that the iPad is a personal computer and it could be argued that smartphones are an even more personal device. But for the sake of analyst’s market share pies, tablets and smartphones are segregated from their x86 counterparts. But much like the honey badger, Apple is the most fearless company in consumer electronics. It just takes what it wants.

Never mind what Apple CEO Tim Cook stated in this week’s earning call. Apple is all about convergence and making products (and its internal workings) as simple as possible. OS X looks and acts very much like iOS. For better or worse, this is driving consumerism toward a simplified operating system void of traditional computing elements. If a true competitors do not step up now, Apple will soon be able to commandeer any market it wants.

Apple already owns the smartphone and tablet market. The PC market doesn’t matter anymore. The company has moved past caring about low-margin computing products. Talk of an Apple HDTV has been around for years and the market is ripe for the taking. The next big step for Apple is enterprise and education with medical not far off.

Even without directly targeting the corporate space, the iPad and iPhone are already a major force in corner offices. Apple simply needs to implement stronger email and security settings and grant IT departments a bit more control of devices to effectively kill RIM. On that same note, a legitimate alternative to MS Exchange would better position Apple against Microsoft.

Apple used to be synonymous with education, and with the launch of iBooks textbooks last year, the company took strides to regain that distinction. However, there is still just a limited number of these interactive textbooks available, and they’re rather costly to implement given the massive upfront cost and liability of buying iPads for students. But this is how Apple works. It often launches services such as iTunes and the App Store before there are devices to fully utilize the capabilities. Look for Apple to slowly gain a huge following thanks to just these educational tools.

Android is the only hope to stand tall against Apple and it’s currently in a sad state. Google is giving OEMs too much leeway. The old adage of choice is good is working against Android. Four years after Android launched, consumers overwhelming choosing the competitor within the last three months. Google needs to rein its armies back in and refocus with a unified message. As an owner of both an Android and iPhone, I sincerely believe Android is a better OS but the iPhone is a better device.

Samsung has the right idea with the Galaxy line. As their adverts assert, they’re anti-iPhones thanks to their larger screens and wide range of models. Motorola took a step in a similar direction with RAZR MAXX. The larger battery offers something different than iPhone clones. But even with the launch of these major flagships, the iPhone 4S trampled on their highly advertised launch parades.

It’s hard to imagine a future without Apple. Per a study released today, 33% of American households already own an Apple product. The iOS behemoth will not be stopped. Android’s needless fragmentation and constant infighting will ensure that. The iPad will slowly morph into the de facto personal computing device. There will still be alternatives. Android and Windows will not completely go away, but Apple’s massive cash reserves will allow it to sway markets and assert unquestionable power. Apple could, if it really wanted, cut the price of the iPad in half and absorb the losses. iTunes and the App Store have shown they’re a major source of revenue alone. It would also make the device much more tempting for educators and IT departments.

But Apple isn’t in the position for global dominance just yet. First, the company needs to make even bigger inroads into China. It was announced in this week’s earning call that revenue from the Chinese market increased threefold over last year’s second quarter to $12.4 billion. In fact that falls just short of Apple’s previous complete year revenue from the prior year. And this is without the country’s largest carrier, China Mobile, offering the iPhone to its 600 million subscribers.

After China falls into Apple’s pocket, the world will be its oyster which the iPhone will open. And that’s a bit scary.


CRUNCHBASE
APPLE
Company:
Apple
Website:
apple.com
Launch Date:
April 1, 1976
IPO:
NASDAQ:AAPL
Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod (offered with...
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[powerglide]

Android är för stort.

3,997 Models: Android Fragmentation

3,997 Models: Android Fragmentation As Seen By The Developers Of OpenSignalMaps
CHRIS VELAZCOposted yesterday24 Comments

Over the past six months, the folks at OpenSignalMaps have been keeping tabs on the devices that have been downloading their network monitoring app, and so far they’ve recorded downloads onto 681,900 separate Android devices in 195 countries. Now they’ve taken all that data and splayed it out for all to see, and it highlights rather nicely how big a headache fragmentation can be for developers.

For the most part, the results are as you’d expect — runaway hits like Samsung’s Galaxy S II was the most represented device among the 3,997 distinct models they spotted, and Samsung Android devices were far and away the most widely used. What really gets me is how many other devices and brands fill up the rest of that list. Seriously, if you haven’t yet, go look at it. Mouse-over some of the smaller blocks, see if there are any brands or devices that ring a bell.

It’s pretty crazy to see just how many players are in the field, and nothing against OpenSignalMaps — their app is actually pretty damned useful — but it’s not an immediate must-download for every user.

That there are gobs of Android devices floating around out there isn’t exactly a shocker, but data like this really drives home the issue. With so many devices running so many versions of Android with who knows many carrier- and manufacturer-mandated tweaks onboard, how is a developer supposed to make sure that all of their users gets a consistent experience? They can’t, unless they’re willing to test like crazy.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt famously downplayed the term “fragmentation” at this year’s CES, suggesting instead that people call it “differentiation.” It’s hard not to agree with sentiment on some level — after all, one of Android’s key strengths is how easily it fits into different niches and price points. But according to him, as long as every Android user is able to use the same apps, there’s no problem here.

That strikes me as a rather shortsighted way of looking at it. Downloading and installing apps is one thing, but what I think really counts — the user experience — can still vary from hardware configuration to hardware configuration. Not a day goes by without new Android hardware (or rumors of new Android hardware) making the rounds — hell, just an hour or so ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google will soon be filling out the new Devices section in the Google Play Store with new, unlocked “Nexus” hardware thanks to cooperation from up to five hardware manufacturers.

That’s why developers like Animoca have invested what I can only imagine is a sizable amount of money and effort testing their apps with something like 400 Android devices before pushing them out into the world. And of course, fragmentation isn’t just a hardware issue — the OSM post points out that the two most used versions of Android now only account for 75% of the devices they surveyed, down from 90% last year, yet another issue for developers to grapple with.

Does every developer need to go through a process that outlandish? Certainly not — OpenSignalMaps seems to test on a tiny fraction of that, and smaller developers can cover most of their bases with a handful of carefully chosen devices. At the end of the day though, despite the sheer amount of choice and flexibility that Android has provided users, those developers still have a choice to make — do they want to strive for perfection, or do they want to keep their sanity?

 

[wheelie82]

Vet inte. Har inget simkort i för jag kommer bara ha den som lektelefon. Men att jag inte har simkort i borde väl knappas påverka möjligheterna att få upp den som usb-enhet?

Enklaste är ju att logga in med ett gmail-konto. Då kan du ladda ner från PLAY market eller vad det kallas nuförtiden.
Angående usb-enhet så får du kolla i inställningar, där kan man välja vilken typ av anslutning som ska ske vid inkoppling i datorn. USB-enhet ska finnas med. Så bara koppla ihop och köra!

 

[Putte]

Vet inte. Har inget simkort i för jag kommer bara ha den som lektelefon. Men att jag inte har simkort i borde väl knappas påverka möjligheterna att få upp den som usb-enhet?

Måste ju aktivera den med ett sim innan du kan använda den.

 

[powerglide]

Allt var inte bättre förr

How Do Top Android Developers QA Test Their Apps?

A couple weeks ago I ran this post showing how one Hong Kong developer, Animoca, tests its Android games. The company, which has had more than 70 million downloads, tests every one of their apps on about 400 different devices. The photo above is from their headquarters and is just a taste of all the Android phones and tablets they use.

Needless to say, that post pissed Android supporters off. Some commenters said it intimidated would-be developers, who might get scared off by Android fragmentation and the perception that you have to support hundreds of devices, screen sizes and densities and versions of the OS.

So, I asked around to see how other mobile game developers do quality assurance testing for Android. This is what I got:



Red Robot Labs: (Backed by Benchmark Capital. Veteran founding team from EA, Playdom and Crowdstar. More than 3.5 million downloads. They currently have the #27 top-grossing game in the Google Play store.)

Red Robot uses about 12 devices in-house and has a quality assurance team of two people. They then use a U.K.-based company called Testology to get further coverage with 35 handsets.

“I applied a common sense filter,” says co-founder Pete Hawley, who hails from EA and has more than 15 years’ experience in the gaming industry. He goes by an 80/20 rule in trying to identify a low number of devices that will cover the widest amount of users. They start with the basic data from Google that shows overall distribution of different versions of Android and screen size densities. Then they look at their analytics to find which devices are most widely used by their players. Finally, they’ll look at player requests and support tickets.

He says it’s good to be selective about which devices to support, especially with all sorts of lower-end handsets coming in from Asia.

“Saying no to players with small, poor, outdated phones or old OSs is important too,” he says. ”Overall, I’d say the process of staying on top of all the handsets, carriers, OS’s and carriers wasn’t as hard as I expected. It’s not a great deal of work to keep the 80 percent well-covered.”

Here’s a snapshot of how Red Robot’s device distribution looked last fall. (It’s a very fragmented pie!)




Pocket Gems: (Backed by Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures. More than 70 million downloads. Newer to Android, but they had two of the top 10 grossing iOS games for all of last year according to Apple’s iTunes Rewind. #35 top-grossing game in Google Play.)

So Pocket Gems’ QA testing is actually run by a former Air Force colonel(!) named Ray Vizzone. They use a little more than 40 devices evaluated in a matrix they explain in the video below. They make sure they include both tablets and phones and then high-resolution and low-resolution devices. They also make sure to include all five major graphic processing units (GPUs) including Adreno, PowerVR, Tegra, Mali and Vivante.

Their QA process is designed to be hyper-speedy as the gaming industry has changed in some fundamental ways over the last few years. Like what Zynga has done in the social gaming industry, today’s mobile games are more like services rather than finished products you pick up off the shelf. So they require constant updates with fresh content every few days.

For the San Francisco-based startup, quality assurance testing is a 24-7 process that involves teams both in the U.S. and abroad. After the U.S. team designs and performs tests during the day, they hand their work to an offshore team that has all of the exact same 40 or so Android devices. This team does extra compatibility testing overnight and files all of the bugs into a defect tracking system, which go back to the U.S. team in the morning.

Pocket Gems tests all features in three phases. They have 1) new features testing 2) integration testing and 3) release candidate testing. Even as developers design new features for their games, Pocket Gems’ QA teams are already at work designing tests for them so they can be checked the moment they’re ready. Once those features are stabilized, they’re integrated into the games and tested a second time.

“As the bugs are found and fixed during integration testing, the product managers and test leads begin their risk assessment as to when to freeze the code base in preparation for shipping,” co-founder Harlan Crystal explains. “Once this decision is made, a full regression test pass is started.”

That final pass involves a full suit of tests that examine memory, performance and device compatibility. “If we don’t find any new or critical bugs during this RC test pass, we bless the bits and ship it!” he says.


View this document on Scribd

Storm8: (More than 300 million downloads. Totally bootstrapped. Four games in Android’s top-grossing 50. Founders are early Facebook alums.)

Storm8 uses between 30 and 50 devices, which they divide into groups of high-end, mid-range and low-end devices. They intentionally buy devices for each category. After they launch games, they have the apps send back different KPIs (key performance indicators) back to the company’s servers.

“This way, we can tell if we need to further fine-tune a certain class of devices, or even specific devices, to squeeze the last bit of performance from the devices,” says chief executive Perry Tam.



Animoca: (More then 70 million downloads. Backed by IDG-Accel and Intel Capital).

After the original post ran, Animoca ran a longer piece explaining why it does quality assurance testing with so many devices. The main reason is because the company has a huge user base in mainland China and other parts of Asia where there is a plethora of lower-end and non-compatible Android devices (meaning phones that are based on the OS but aren’t certified to run Google applications or the official Android app store).

“If we had taken the approach that 90 percent compatibility is good enough, we’d be lacking support for 7 million of [our] downloads,” the company explains. “Several millions of consumers would have had a bad experience as a result of our decision, and our app revenues would probably be short by around 10 percent.”

Keep in mind that Animoca is not exactly a young company. It’s a mobile gaming-centric arm of a more than 10-year-old company called Outblaze that has focused on digital media and apps for years. So they have lots of experience in doing compatibility and quality assurance testing.

The company’s chief executive Yat Siu feels that their comprehensiveness is a part of why they perform decently on the platform, with “double-digit” millions of dollars in revenue per year from Android. Animoca doesn’t have any games in the top-grossing 50 right now, but they make up for it in the sheer number of apps they publish per year.





Conclusion: If this still freaks you out, just remember that it was way worse in the days of feature phones. (At least, that’s what Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka tells us. Rovio says compared to the J2ME/Brew era, Android is actually easy! They had to make more than 50 games before they created uber-hit Angry Birds.)

Just for reminders about how hard it was then, here are two slides from JAMDAT’s original IPO slidedeck in 2005. JAMDAT was the seminal mobile gaming acquisition of the feature phone era when they were bought by Electronic Arts for $680 million. The company had to spend five years building relationships with more than 90 carriers in about 40 countries and it was standard to support about 400 devices.

So while Android fragmentation seems like a headache, your dad’s mobile app maker was trudging seven miles uphill in the snow QA testing with 400 different phones and dealing with business development people from a hundred carriers.

It’s also easier now with specialty shops handle mobile QA testing now like Testology, which Red Robot uses, and uTest. That said, the very biggest developers still want to do most everything in-house.

 

[powerglide]

The Mobile Apps Gap: For Every 10 Apps Built 7 Are iOS

The Mobile Apps Gap: For Every 10 Apps Built 7 Are iOS
Published on June 7, 2012
Written by: Greg Sterling

Flurry Analytics has released data, drawn from its logs, that illustrate mobile app developers’ continuing preference for Apple’s iOS over Android.

Among other reasons, Apple’s iOS offers “efficiency” and a “homogenous device base” (iPhone, iPad). By contrast, Flurry observes that Android is highly fragmented and that the problem “appears to be increasing.” Indeed, there are numerous Android devices, with different hardware and screen sizes, as well as different versions of the Android OS: Gingerbread, Froyo, Ice Cream Sandwich, etc.



Flurry reports that “for every 10 apps that developers build, roughly 7 are for iOS.” The company says that the iPad has been instrumental in cementing developer loyalty. Unlike the smartphone market where Android dominates, the iPad remains unrivaled in the tablet market.



Notwithstanding “shipments” data from IDC, Gartner and other firms showing Kindle Fire and other tablets encroaching on the iPad’s market share, Flurry shows the iPad with 88 percent of the tablet market.



As has been pointed out in the past, iOS developers also make more money than Android developers. Flurry says that iOS revenue is on average 4X greater than that from Android.

“For every $1.00 a developer earns on iOS, he can expect to earn about $0.24 on Android,” according to Flurry.

 

[Coola Ola]

Är det alltid så här krångligt att uppdatera en Android-lur?
För det första, Mac-appen som Sony tillhandhåller hittar inte min telefon trots att det ska fungera enligt Sony själva, så jag måste använda Windows. Väl där så krävs tre försök innan Sony PC companion öht klarar att "förbereda datorn" för uppdatering, vilket genomförs under stor seghet och väntetid. Därefter går själva nedladdandet relativt smärtfritt, men i samband med det så måste jag först koppla ifrån telefonen (och stänga av den, enligt instruktionerna, dock är den redan avstängd av sig självt innan jag kopplat ur den?). Sen ska jag koppla in den igen, samtidigt som jag håller in "sänka ljudet"-knappen medan jag kopplar in USB-sladden (??). Först därefter påbörjas själva uppdateringen. Sammanlagd tid för detta var över en timme. Smidigt.

 

[MatteKholm]

Näe, en vettig androidlur uppdateras ota.

 

[Coola Ola]

Näe, en vettig androidlur uppdateras ota.

Ja, vanliga 2.x uppdateringar har kommit OTA, men nu var det ICS-uppdateringen. Finns det lurar som fixar det utan att anslutas till dator också alltså?

 

[MatteKholm]

Ah, det vet jag inte, min hade ICS från början.

 

[sportbike]

Ja, vanliga 2.x uppdateringar har kommit OTA, men nu var det ICS-uppdateringen. Finns det lurar som fixar det utan att anslutas till dator också alltså?

Jag köpte en Galaxy S2, den frågade om jag ville uppdatera till ICS over the air, funkade klockers.

 

[MatteKholm]

Jag köpte en Galaxy S2, den frågade om jag ville uppdatera till ICS over the air, funkade klockers.

Exempel på en bra telelur. ;-)

 

[powerglide]

Bumped

 

[MatteKholm]

http://www.svd.se/naringsliv/bransc...nsproblem-kan-drabba-nya-iphone-5_7466048.svd

Jag är riktigt nyfiken på nya Iphone! Hoppas dom tagit i lite med skärmstorleken, nåt som varit deras akilleshäl.

 

[Putte]

http://www.svd.se/naringsliv/bransc...nsproblem-kan-drabba-nya-iphone-5_7466048.svd

Jag är riktigt nyfiken på nya Iphone! Hoppas dom tagit i lite med skärmstorleken, nåt som varit deras akilleshäl.

Måste va över 4 tum annars blir jag fan gråtfärdig..

 

[MatteKholm]

Måste va över 4 tum annars blir jag fan gråtfärdig..

Mer än 4.5 annars är det ett bottenapp och tack och adjö för äpplet.