iOS fragmentation vs. Android fragmentation

[Moandji Ezana]

I was listening to ep. 3 of Build and Analyze, a podcast hosted by Marco Arment (of Instapaper) and Dan Benjamin.

They mentioned that iOS 4.2 introduced a new compilation system to make dealing with multiple OS versions easier (Arment called the preceding hacks "messy").

Android fragmentation is always a big topic, but it made me wonder if Apple isn't starting to realise they'll face similar issues soon and is building tools to combat it. While it'll probably never be quite as big or complex an issue as in Android, I wonder if iOS won't end up with a similar system of declaring what your app needs and only showing users apps compatible with whatever OS/device combination they have.

As I don't use any iOS devices, maybe this is already the case? How is this handled currently? Could fragmentation become an issue for iOS?

Moandji

[Vince O'Sullivan]

Fragmentation is the least of it. We're already having to issue two
versions of the same apps to cover ios and android, plus stuff for
Blackberries. Soon we'll be adding Windows 7 mobile to the mix.
Symbian is still out there and it looks like PalmOS might be being
revived and brought into the 21st century. It's a stupid logistical
nightmare imposed by mobile hardware companies, principally Apple.

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 3, 12:59 pm, "Vince O'Sullivan" <vjosulli...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It's a stupid logistical
> nightmare imposed by mobile hardware companies, principally Apple.

How is Apple responsible for you having to support multiple OS?

[Vince O'Sullivan]

By insisting on having only apps written in Objectionable C on their
phones.

[Karsten Silz]

Even leaving Apple out, don't Android, Blackberry, Windows 7, PalmOS
and Symbian also use different SDKs, too? And except for Blackberry
and Android, don't they all have different languages (it's C++ for
Symbian, isn't?)?

[Fabrizio Giudici]

On 12/03/2010 01:41 PM, Vince O'Sullivan wrote:
>
> By insisting on having only apps written in Objectionable C on their
> phones.

I understand your frustration, but why to blame Apple only and not the
other ones?

I think that unfortunately the existence of multiple technologies is now
unavoidable due to the stagnation of JME, and in such a circumstance
it's obvious - while unfortunate - that any provider pushes its own stuff.

--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici - www.tidalwave.it/people
Fabrizio...@tidalwave.it

[Kevin Wright]

Presumably, Apple are the biggest problem here because none of the others tried to forbid you cross-compiling from something else to their favourite pet language/SDK. 

--
Kevin Wright

mail / gtalk / msn : kev.lee...@gmail.com

pulse / skype: kev.lee.wright
twitter: @thecoda

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 3, 2:19 pm, Kevin Wright <kev.lee.wri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Presumably, Apple are the biggest problem here because none of the others
> tried to forbid you cross-compiling from something else to their favourite
> pet language/SDK.

From what I understand, you can now cross-compile and use any
scripting engine you like. The only thing off-limits is downloading
code at runtime, since this would allow you to circumvent the app
store.

[Kevin Wright]

Hence me saying "tried to" and not "try to"

[Chris Adamson]

But Apple doesn't forbid cross-compilation or VMs anymore, so why are
we still talking about it? Just to score "Apple is evil" points?

Secondly, is it really fair to blame the stagnation of Java ME for
fragmentation? The hardware manufacturers and carriers are loath to
have a standard -- any standard -- because that deprives them of a
means of making their products and services distinctive, and therefore
have an advantage over competitors. It may be that the goals of Java
ME didn't match the goals of the people who actually need to make
handsets and mobile networks. It's interesting to see where Android
is following ME's lead and where it's doing things differently.

--Chris

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 3, 12:16 pm, Moandji Ezana <mwa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As I don't use any iOS devices, maybe this is already the case? How is this
> handled currently? Could fragmentation become an issue for iOS?

In short: no.

I would define fragmentation on three levels - hardware, OS, drivers.

On the Apple side, the hardware is known - iPhones / iPod Touches and
iPad. You typically get the oldest iPod Touch you want to support and
use that as your baseline device (I bought an iPod Touch 1G on ebay
and run it with iOS 3.0). All screens have the same size and the same
pixel ratio - iPhone / iPod Touch is 1,5:1 - 480x320 / 960x640 - and
iPad is 1.33:1. This is important for bitmap graphics since you can
size so that they don't need to stretched or scaled by the device.

On the OS side, some of the hardware differences are abstracted away
by frameworks - when you use Core Location to determine your, well,
location, then it uses just your WiFi hotspot on iPod / WiFi iPad and
cell tower and GPS on iPhone / iPad with UMTS. Core Animation makes
sure that your animations run smoothly no matter which device you use
- they generally take the same amount of time but have less frames on
older hardware (only possible because Apple knows all hardware and the
drivers).

Some of the hardware difference you have to take check yourself - such
as "no camera" on iPad / iPod Touches or "Am I running on an iPad".
For this, iOS can do something that I think Java/Android cannot - you
compile against and use classes / methods from the latest iOS (such as
4.2) but still deploy on older devices (such as iOS 3.0) where they
don't exist. Objective-C is a dynamic language, and you can check for
the existence of methods and classes before you call them. An example:
I recently worked on an app that streams audio files from a URL.
Starting with iOS 4, the Apple Media Player framework that I use for
this can run inline in your view; before, it was only available full
screen. In my first version I just called the new methods to set up
the inline mode and it worked fine on my iPhone but crashed on my iPod
Touch with iOS 3.0 (this is what happens when you call non-existing
methods). So I surrounded the "inline code" with a check for the
existence of a new method. This way, it worked inline on iOS 4.x and
full-screen on iOS 3.x.

Typically, Apple documents how to check for a certain hardware / API
feature to be there, with the "does method exist" being the most
common. Sometimes there's also a macro (such as "if
(UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() == UIUserInterfaceIdiomPad)"). Generally,
Apple is pragmatic about this stuff. For instance, if you want to
support the retina display, you add a high-resolution version of your
images to the app and just append a "@2" to the file name - the
runtime then picks the right ones; text is automatically rendered at
the higher resolution. Or you can specify a different XIB file (user
interface definition done with Interface Builder) for the iPad when
you build a universal app that runs on iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch.

Now the OS can't help out with everything. For instance, iOS 4
introduced blocks (=closures) - you probably want to only use them if
you go iOS 4 only. Another case is what Marco referred to in the
podcast: He wanted to subclass a class that only existed in 4.2 (for
supporting AirPrint), and that crashed on older iOS versions. Apple
introduced weak linking for selected classes for this in iOS 4.2
(details: http://www.marco.org/1648550153). Also, Xcode doesn't help
you finding at least the obvious cases - such as calling an iOS 4.x
only method in a project that can run against 3.x. Also, iOS devices
before the iPhone 3GS only have 128 MB of RAM which means that some
apps (especially games) either get choppier or use lower-resolution
graphic/sound resources.

Knowing drivers is especially important for game developers that use
OpenGL. On the desktop, there are typically a lot of bugs in the
drivers that developers need to work around. For iOS devices (and
laptops), you'll know the display hardware and the drivers exactly and
can program around the known issues. Sound drivers often have issues,
too.

I don't know much about Android, but for developers, the hardware and
drivers are generally not known entirely. This starts with different
display resolutions and display ratios (e.g., 480x320 is 1.5:1,
whereas 800x480 is 1.66:1), optional (I think) hardware acceleration
for 2D/3D graphics and videos and various driver issues for the
graphics and sound hardware . I think that for "regular business
applications", you can build them resolution-independent so that they
work (mostly) fine across most Android devices. For instance, a lot
of Android apps run on the Galaxy tab - they may waste a lot of space
in tables, for instance, but they run. Images may be squished or
stretched due to different pixel ratios, though (please correct me if
I'm wrong here).

However, for games that is more difficult - games are less tolerant of
lags and audio / video getting out of sync and missing hardware
acceleration and OpenGL driver bugs. I think this is what the Angry
Birds developer ran into on Android - they specifically exclude a
bunch of Android devices as "not supported" and plan for a light
version (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/angry-birds-ruffled-over-
android-fragmentation/10468). Money quote from a comment on the
original developer blog entry: "Fragmandroid". :-) Angry Birds
doesn't strike me as a performance-hungry game, but what do I
know. :-)

I think for games, Android is more like Windows, and iOS is more like
a game console - a lot of variation and testing on Android and less of
that on iOS. Now unlike a game console which remains unchanged to
developers for 5-10 years (for the most part), iOS gets a new model
annually, and Android fragmentation isn't as bad as Windows, but I
think the tendency is correct.

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 3, 2:46 pm, Chris Adamson <invalidn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The hardware manufacturers and carriers are loath to
> have a standard -- any standard -- because that deprives them of a
> means of making their products and services distinctive, and therefore
> have an advantage over competitors.

Good point. Apple will probably hide the differences between their iOS
devices as much as possible since it's a competitive advantage for
attracting and keeping developers. On the Android side, most
manufacturers and carries will try to make the phones as different as
possible since they want to compete on "features" and "value-add", not
just on price. Sidenote: Android head honcho Rubin really called the
crapware and restrictions that carriers and manufacturers put on
Android phones "value-add" (http://www.tipb.com/2010/10/08/android-
founder-carriers-add-spit/).

[Moandji Ezana]

Thanks for the informative answer. Android and iOS are a little closer than I thought.

I would define fragmentation on three levels - hardware, OS, drivers.

All screens have the same size and the same
pixel ratio - iPhone / iPod Touch is 1,5:1 - 480x320 / 960x640 - and
iPad is 1.33:1.  This is important for bitmap graphics since you can
size so that they don't need to stretched or scaled by the device.

That might not always be the case, as more and more iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch versions come out.

On Android, you have profiles: high, medium and low. I assume more will be added for tablets. There are standard scaling ratios between them, so that you can provide graphic assets for each profile. You also use "density-independent pixels" for fonts, margins, etc.The device then handles the little bit of scaling left between the profile and reality.

 

On the OS side, some of the hardware differences are abstracted away
by frameworks - when you use Core Location to determine your, well,
location, then it uses just your WiFi hotspot on iPod / WiFi iPad and
cell tower and GPS on iPhone / iPad with UMTS.

Android is similar: you declare that you need a location service, so phones that don't have one won't see your app in the market. Then, you don't have to worry about how location is actually found.

More generally, you can specify the hardware you absolutely need, and the hardware you will use if available. This is described on the Android Developer Blog and the features you can test for are listed here.

 

Core Animation makes
sure that your animations run smoothly no matter which device you use
- they generally take the same amount of time but have less frames on
older hardware (only possible because Apple knows all hardware and the
drivers).

Some of the hardware difference you have to take check yourself - such
as "no camera" on iPad / iPod Touches or "Am I running on an iPad".
For this, iOS can do something that I think Java/Android cannot - you
compile against and use classes / methods from the latest iOS (such as
4.2) but still deploy on older devices (such as iOS 3.0) where they
don't exist.

You can do this on Android. On Dalvik (and I believe on HotSpot as well), only code that is actually executed gets loaded. So, you can put OS version-dependent functionality behind an interface and check the OS version before instantiating the appropriate implementation. This is described in detail here.

 

For instance, if you want to
support the retina display, you add a high-resolution version of your
images to the app and just append a "@2" to the file name - the
runtime then picks the right ones; text is automatically rendered at
the higher resolution.

Wow, that seems kind of random. Android has a more structured and generic system. Any resource (graphics, UI element, i18n, styles, colors...) can be specified per screen profile, screen orientation and locale in any combination. Every time the screen is drawn, it decides which resource is most appropriate. For example, you can have one screen layout for English and another for Japanese.

 

Knowing drivers is especially important for game developers that use
OpenGL.  On the desktop, there are typically a lot of bugs in the
drivers that developers need to work around.  For iOS devices (and
laptops), you'll know the display hardware and the drivers exactly and
can program around the known issues.  Sound drivers often have issues,
too.

 

I don't know much about Android, but for developers, the hardware and
drivers are generally not known entirely.  

I haven't done any work with driver-related stuff, but that does seem to be where most of the problems lie. Bob Lee and Eric Burke gave a presentation (video on InfoQ) in which they describe the audio processing they do and a sampling rate-related bug they found on Samsung phones that freezes the phone and forces the user to take out the battery...

 

I think this is what the Angry
Birds developer ran into on Android - they specifically exclude a
bunch of Android devices as "not supported" and plan for a light

version... Angry Birds

doesn't strike me as a performance-hungry game, but what do I
know.  :-)

A friend of mine showed me Angry Birds on his HTC Hero, it's basically unplayable. Runs fine on my HTC Desire, though. I don't know if it's possible to restrict apps based on performance characteristics. That would be useful for game developers, I guess.

Moandji

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 3, 5:26 pm, Moandji Ezana <mwa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > All screens have the same size and the same
> > pixel ratio - iPhone / iPod Touch is 1,5:1 - 480x320 / 960x640 - and
> > iPad is 1.33:1.  This is important for bitmap graphics since you can
> > size so that they don't need to stretched or scaled by the device.
>
> That might not always be the case, as more and more iPhone, iPad and iPod
> Touch versions come out.

I don't think so. There's a reason Apple stuck with 480x320 until
they could quadruple the resolution with the Retina display; I predict
the same for the iPad. And given how Jobs recently laid into 7 inch
tablet, I think we may be seeing a considerably larger iPad,if at
all. Apple knows that on touch interfaces physical size of UI
elements matter a lot (a button on a 4.2 inch phone may be too small
on a 3 inch one) and that especially games are easier to write against
a single resolution.

> > For instance, if you want to
> > support the retina display, you add a high-resolution version of your
> > images to the app and just append a "@2" to the file name - the
> > runtime then picks the right ones; text is automatically rendered at
> > the higher resolution.
>
> Wow, that seems kind of random. Android has a more structured and generic
> system.

I prefer "pragmatic". I think the UI approach (conversations?) is a
bit more complicated than on iOS, where you typically just have tabs
and navigations stacks.

> I haven't done any work with driver-related stuff, but that does seem to be
> where most of the problems lie.

Drivers are one of the biggest source of problems for game developers.

> A friend of mine showed me Angry Birds on his HTC Hero, it's basically
> unplayable. Runs fine on my HTC Desire, though. I don't know if it's
> possible to restrict apps based on performance characteristics. That would
> be useful for game developers, I guess.

This is what I don't really understand - I mean this is a 2D game with
some zooming, shouldn't all Android phones be able to run it?

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 5:46 AM, Chris Adamson <inval...@gmail.com> wrote:

It's interesting to see where Android
is following ME's lead and where it's doing things differently.

I wouldn't call it "following Java ME's lead", more like "fixing all the stupid mistakes that Java ME made". Which was a clear mandate since day one.

--
Cédric

[Cédric Beust ♔]

Thanks for the detailed explanation, Karsten.

At the end of the day, I think you are still basically describing fragmentation on the iOS, period. Apple is trying hard to keep it down (such as by using resolutions that are integer multiples of each other. And then, there's DPI...), but it's still an uphill battle for them because they didn't build their OS with this in mind from day one, like Android did.

I've always smiled whenever I heard someone say that on Apple, you don't have fragmentation problems because you only have one device. Somehow, people saw that as an advantage, a bit like the Ford Model T motto "you can have any color you want as long as it's black".

This advantage clearly went out of the window when the iPad came out, and it's just the beginning. Apple can try to keep this under control to a certain extent by constraining the hardware they come up with, but the fragmentation cat is already out of the bag: you have to test for the presence of cameras, for the display resolution, etc...  That's fragmentation.

I wonder if iOS app developers realize how much of a nightmare their lives are about to become :-)

-- 

Cédric

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group.
To post to this group, send email to java...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.

--
Cédric

[Casper Bang]

On Dec 3, 2:46 pm, Chris Adamson <invalidn...@gmail.com> wrote:

> But Apple doesn't forbid cross-compilation or VMs anymore, so why are
> we still talking about it? Just to score "Apple is evil" points?

Quick sidetrack, have you tried MonoTouch and what are your
experiences with it? I like what I see in MonoDroid, although the
difference between Java and C# must be minute compared to between
Objective C and C#.

[Fabrizio Giudici]

On 12/03/2010 02:46 PM, Chris Adamson wrote:
> But Apple doesn't forbid cross-compilation or VMs anymore, so why are
> we still talking about it? Just to score "Apple is evil" points?
>
> Secondly, is it really fair to blame the stagnation of Java ME for
> fragmentation? The hardware manufacturers and carriers are loath to
> have a standard -- any standard -- because that deprives them of a
> means of making their products and services distinctive,

Sure, but it's relatively easy to gain the favour of developers when
they are frustrated with the current standards. Let's suppose three
years ago JME was technically like Android is now. That is, far from
being perfect, but people like and enjoy it, and fragmentation issues
are magnitudos smaller than JME. Don't you think that other platform
providers would have had a much harder job to push their stuff?

--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici - www.tidalwave.it/people

Fabrizio...@tidalwave.itthe

[Miroslav Pokorny]

Why hasnt any vendor offered the ability to use vector gfx as a mechanism for deliverying resources like icons etc so that the phone renders them into bitmaps upon install eliminating the need for multiple forms of the same logo for each different profile ?

[Moandji Ezana]

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 10:20 PM, Miroslav Pokorny <miroslav...@gmail.com> wrote:

Why hasnt any vendor offered the ability to use vector gfx as a mechanism for deliverying resources like icons etc so that the phone renders them into bitmaps upon install eliminating the need for multiple forms of the same logo for each different profile ?

I've wondered about that myself. I also wonder if the unnecessary duplicate resources are eliminated when the user installs the app. Having images in triplicate seems wasteful. Cédric?

Moandji

[Miroslav Pokorny]

Maybe vector resources shouldn't be mandatory but vectors for Fonts has worked out well. Nobody delivers bitmap fonts anymore they all get distrod via vectors w/ hints. 

--

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 3, 7:18 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:
> At the end of the day, I think you are still basically describing
> fragmentation on the iOS, period. Apple is trying hard to keep it down (such
> as by using resolutions that are integer multiples of each other. And then,
> there's DPI...), but it's still an uphill battle for them because they
> didn't build their OS with this in mind from day one, like Android did.

Yes, there's fragmentation in iOS, but to the best of my knowledge,
it's really just four different things:
- if you support the first iPhones / iPod Touches: prevent iOS 4.x
calls on iOS 3.x
- include your bitmaps in normal resolution and high resolution (even
on Retina Display, you still have 480x320 "pixels", that's why you
don't care about the higher resolution outside of bitmap images; I
think in games you may have access to the "native pixels", but I'm not
sure)
- if you use camera or telephone: check for it to be there
- if you have a very demanding game or do something very memory-
intense: be aware of the 128 MB RAM on iOS before iPhone 3 GS

If think the Angry Bird guys would kill to deal with such a
fragmentation on Android. ;-)

When I hear about this sound bug on the Galaxy that freezes the phone,
that reminds of a friend who worked on J2ME navigation software and
cursed the buggy GPS/Bluetooth implementation there.

I stand by my comment that systematically, fragmentation in iOS land
is much less than in Android land because Apple controls all hardware
and software and wants fragmentation to be low. Google only controls
the OS, the vendors control the hardware and the drivers (or their
suppliers do the drivers), and the carrier puts its coating on top,
and both the carrier and the vendor want to differentiate on features,
not just on price.

> This advantage clearly went out of the window when the iPad came out, and
> it's just the beginning.

The iPad is a different device class from an iPod Touch / iPhone, it
is used differently than a phone, its screen estate is roughly four
times that of an iPhone, and it has different UI elements (split view
controller, pop-over controller, toolbars). You want to have a good
app on the iPad, you need to take all this into account and build your
app specifically for this new scenario. If you treat a tablet just
like an oversized phone, you get the Galaxy Tab.

> I wonder if iOS app developers realize how much of a nightmare their lives
> are about to become :-)

I think developers like to build apps specifically for the iPad - I
think there are about 30,000 apps for it already.

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 3, 5:26 pm, Moandji Ezana <mwa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Bob Lee and Eric Burke gave a
> presentation (video

> on InfoQ <http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Android-Squared>) in which they

> describe the audio processing they do and a sampling rate-related bug they
> found on Samsung phones that freezes the phone and forces the user to take
> out the battery...

Reminds me of when Steam, the game distribution system, launched on
the Mac. After a week, Valve claimed that the Mac was "'five times
more stable than Windows' when using the metric of minutes played
versus number of crashes." This was attributed to a the rather few
combinations of hardware + OS + drivers (which are part of OS X,
unlike on Windows). Would love to know how these stats look now.

[Vince O'Sullivan]

On Dec 3, 1:15 pm, Fabrizio Giudici <fabrizio.giud...@tidalwave.it>
wrote:

> On 12/03/2010 01:41 PM, Vince O'Sullivan wrote:
>
> > By insisting on having only apps written in Objectionable C on their
> > phones.
>
> I understand your frustration, but why to blame Apple only and not the
> other ones?

Because Apple are setting the pace at the moment. They could have
done the right thing and taken the line that devices are there for the
benefit of users and not the other way around, or they could have
taken the line that open standards are the way to go. Oh, wait a
moment... didn't they use that line to ban Flash from their devices.
Or they could have decided not to drop Java the moment Java developers
stopped being a significant part of their market share.

[Moandji Ezana]

Isn't that what they did originally by not having apps, but a great browser?

Moandji

--
www.moandjiezana.com

Sent from my Android

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 4, 9:15 am, "Vince O'Sullivan" <vjosulli...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Because Apple are setting the pace at the moment.  They could have
> done the right thing and taken the line that devices are there for the
> benefit of users and not the other way around, or they could have
> taken the line that open standards are the way to go.

Apple has two platforms on iOS: It's proprietary, curated app store
and the web, based on the "open HTML 5 standard" (yeah, it's not done,
but it's already useful). And they push both forward - just look at
what they just added to Safari in 4.2 (http://www.mobilexweb.com/blog/
safari-ios-accelerometer-websockets-html5). Apps can take full
advantage of everything in the device, web apps only get a subset but
run cross-platform and without Apple's intervention. How does that
make iOS only be of benefit to Apple and not to its users?

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 8:32 AM, Karsten Silz <karste...@gmail.com> wrote:

Apple has two platforms on iOS: It's proprietary, curated app store
and the web, based on the "open HTML 5 standard" (yeah, it's not done,
but it's already useful).  And they push both forward - just look at
what they just added to Safari in 4.2 (http://www.mobilexweb.com/blog/
safari-ios-accelerometer-websockets-html5).  Apps can take full
advantage of everything in the device, web apps only get a subset but
run cross-platform and without Apple's intervention.  How does that
make iOS only be of benefit to Apple and not to its users?

That's a pretty... er... interesting way of looking at things.

If you really want Apple to have two platforms, these would be iOS and Mac OS. Counting the web as one of them is a bit preposterous. They don't "support" the web, they tolerate it, because they simply can't block users from accessing it (I'm sure they wish they could).

-- 

Cédric

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 4, 5:43 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:

Ok, platforms isn't the right word - let's call it "application
environments". And having a great / the best web browser on iOS is
clearly in Apple's best interest because, well, people browse the web
a lot. Apple supports the web by making the open source Webkit into a
first-class browser that's used by every mobile platform except for
Microsoft. They have full control over their native SDK, so of course
they can innovate there much more. But they continuously improve the
web browser, too. Look at what RIM did - for now, you use Adobe's
cross-platform AIR to write apps for the YAIK (yet another iPad
Killer) Playbook. Just like that, RIM outsourced the tool chain and
most of the SDK to Adobe and lost control over a good chunk of their
platform.

Often people take the "razor - blade" or "lamp - petrol" economic
model and apply it to Apple: You sell a one-time item cheap (razor,
lamp) and then make money by selling expensive consumables (blades,
petrol) for it. So Apple sells you a (cheap?) Mac / iOS device and
then makes money through selling you stuff through the iTunes store /
the app store. Wrong! Firstly, Apple doesn't sell cheap
anything. ;-) Secondly, Apple makes money selling hardware
(typically a 40-50% margin on the bill of materials, leaving out the
unknown R&D costs), not with the iTunes store or the app store.
Apple's CFO said in January that they run the iTunes store "just above
break-even" (http://gigaom.com/apple/more-on-apples-billions-this-time-
its-itunes/). Let's say they make a few hundred millions off of it -
that's still jump change compared to what they make with their
hardware.

iTunes and the app store and the web browser help Apple sell more
hardware, not the other way around. That's why in the end, Apple
doesn't really care whether you buy an iOS device because of the apps
or the web browser. And that's why they can't afford to put the web
browser on hold, like Microsoft did after IE 6.

[Miroslav Pokorny]

Webkit on Iphone sucks its so slow,a s compared to Opera (yes i know its got server assistance), so it cant be the phone.

[phil swenson]

> Because Apple are setting the pace at the moment.  They could have
> done the right thing and taken the line that devices are there for the
> benefit of users and not the other way around, or they could have
> taken the line that open standards are the way to go.  Oh, wait a
> moment... didn't they use that line to ban Flash from their devices.
> Or they could have decided not to drop Java the moment Java developers
> stopped being a significant part of their market share.

I think you misinterpret Apple's intentions. I think they have two
primary motivations: making money and delivering a great product.

To deliver a great product they want to avoid having a Windows like
experience for the mobile market. By that I mean they want a machine
that does what it's supposed to simply. That means consistency,
intuitive design, no crap-ware, having a platform you can trust (no
viruses, no malware, no spyware, no junk-ware), and great hardware.

There are trade-offs to deliver this experience of course, but I
really think the desired goal is for the "benefit of the users" as
well as the benefit of the company.

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 8:35 PM, phil swenson <phil.s...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think you misinterpret Apple's intentions.  I think they have two
primary motivations:  making money and delivering a great product.

I think a lot of people are totally misinterpreting Jobs' intentions. Apple's intentions might be what you're saying, but Steve Jobs only has one goal: market share.

He has already delivered many great products so he doesn't have much to prove left in that area, and obviously, he's made a lot of money for Apple, Apple's shareholders and himself. So not much incentive left there either.

His last challenge is market share, make no mistake about it.

More details here.

 

--
Cédric

[Miroslav Pokorny]

2010/12/5 Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com>

Steve jobs does not want/care about the money ? That is absolute nonsense he is doing it to make money for himself and fellow shareholders, to state anything else is nonsense. If all he wanted was marketshare Apple it would cut margins too boost sales with an overall lower amount of profit.

[Moandji Ezana]

Which is what they did with the iPad (remember that most people thought the minimum price would be $1000).

I think Cédric is saying market share has been added to the ither goals. Gruber regularly quotes an interview in which Jobs states that not going for market share at the appropriate time had been an early Apple mistake.

Moandji

--
www.moandjiezana.com

Sent from my Android

On 5 Dec 2010 08:13, "Miroslav Pokorny" <miroslav...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/12/5 Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com>
>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 8:35 PM, phil swenson <phil.s...@gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I think you misinterpret Apple's intentions. I think they have two
>>> primary motivations: making money and delivering a great product.
>>>
>>
>> I think a lot of people are totally misinterpreting Jobs' intentions.
>> Apple's intentions might be what you're saying, but Steve Jobs only has one
>> goal: market share.
>>
>> He has already delivered many great products so he doesn't have much to
>> prove left in that area, and obviously, he's made a lot of money for Apple,
>> Apple's shareholders and himself. So not much incentive left there either.
>>
>> His last challenge is market share, make no mistake about it.
>>

>> More details here<http://beust.com/weblog/2010/09/22/what-steve-jobs-really-wants/>

>> .
>>
>> --
>> Cédric
>>
>> Steve jobs does not want/care about the money ? That is absolute nonsense
> he is doing it to make money for himself and fellow shareholders, to state
> anything else is nonsense. If all he wanted was marketshare Apple it would
> cut margins too boost sales with an overall lower amount of profit.
>

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

Steve Jobs, in his role as CEO of Apple, wants what any incorporated
entity is by their shareholders enforced to want: Money.

The interesting bits all revolve around what long-, medium- and short-
term planning CEOs and their executive staff believe will get them
this money. For example, behaving in an unethical fashion in today's
web-connected world tends to result in lots of backlash, which results
at the very least in your position as job provider getting tainted
(the cream of the crop geeks don't want to work for you anymore),
which hurts your long-term planning. Its also likely going to lead to
lots of more direct damage in the short term (boycotts and the like).
Thus, behaving ethically is a financial decision, and its up to us to
make sure the fallout from not behaving ethically remains expensive.
This is why its entirely sane and normal to boycott apple (and scream
it from the rooftops) if you feel they are screwing your long-term
future over. This is why google's "Don't be evil" slogan is an
executive masterpiece: such company slogans are purely a PR move
anyway, and google's get straight to the point. For what its worth,
this isn't immoral or bad - when google does no evil (let's keep
whether or not they are keeping to their pledge out of this thread),
they do no evil. They may do this to keep their image, which gets them
the skilled geeks, which keeps them competitive. The reasons don't
really matter that much - the end result is: Google, as far as
gigantic near-monopolistic companies go, is quite a bit nicer than I
dared hope. But I'm getting sidetracked:

One extremely important property of everything apple does, is that
they are much less married to the idea of "First get the market share,
and then we'll figure out how to monetize it later" compared to other
companies. Apple might have less market share at this point compared
to android, but I'm absolutely positive that apple has an enormous
share of the *earnings* pie in the phone world. They make more money
per iPhone sold, a lot more. The same principle goes for PC sales:
Apple has decent market share, but if you look at the % of the total
pie that apple claims for itself on PC earnings, I believe they are
hovering around the 50% mark. Half of all the money earned in PC
hardware is going to one company, a company that has barely 15% market
share. There's a reason apple's market cap exceeds that of microsoft
and is within 80% of that of Exxon-Mobile's, and is more than 10x as
much as Dell's.

Its true that recently it looks like they may be less beholden to this
principle of late (the iPad was very cheap), but other than the iPad
I'm not really seeing it. The macbooks certainly aren't getting any
cheaper. I'm sure apple could build a decent build quality low-end mac
laptop with yesterday's mac tech, and they'd be quite decent machines
that would sell like hotcakes, but they don't. Probably because, while
it would get them lots of market share, it'll cannibalize the higher
end mac sales where they keep a much larger chunk of the sales price.
If market share was the primary goal, they'd have simply packed it in
and acquiesced to verizon's demand; they'd have built a CDMA iPhone,
added an undeletable verizon app, stuck a verizon logo on the back,
and shipped em out to tens of millions of new customers within the
first quarter of sales.

NB: In regards to the OP: Will iOS fragment? Duh. I find the current
claims that google 'screwed up' by letting android fragment this much
frankly ridiculous. Any mobile platform will fragment, by its very
nature. You can't stick to the same screensizes, speeds, and
capabilities forever, that much should be blindingly obvious. When
developing android apps with widgets, they've used a strategy somewhat
similar to swing's layout managers to make apps device-size
independent (and introduced the 'device independent pixel', too),
which was needed anyway to handle orientation switches. For games this
is less relevant, which is probably why we see a lot more difficulty
with android *game* apps dealing with the fragmentation.

But all platforms need to embrace it, and get tools out the door to
help deal with it. Only way.

On Dec 5, 6:47 am, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 8:35 PM, phil swenson <phil.swen...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I think you misinterpret Apple's intentions.  I think they have two
> > primary motivations:  making money and delivering a great product.
>
> I think a lot of people are totally misinterpreting Jobs' intentions.
> Apple's intentions might be what you're saying, but Steve Jobs only has one
> goal: market share.
>
> He has already delivered many great products so he doesn't have much to
> prove left in that area, and obviously, he's made a lot of money for Apple,
> Apple's shareholders and himself. So not much incentive left there either.
>
> His last challenge is market share, make no mistake about it.
>

[phil swenson]

Well, I agree that market share is important. But saying "one goal
and it's market share" is too strong.

Apple could have easily gotten more market share by slashing prices on
all the products. Their margins are phenomenal and they could cut
prices by 40-50% if they really wanted and gain huge market share.
But their profits would plummet.

on your blog you say "Pop quiz: If you are making a lot of money with
5% market share, how much money will you be making with 10% market
share?
That’s right, twice as much."

That's way too simplistic. How do you get from 5% to 10% market
share? By spending a ton on capital improvements (such as
manufacturing capacity), advertising, lowering prices, etc. So it's a
balancing act.....

They want to be a big player, but not so big that they have to
sacrifice profits.

2010/12/4 Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com>:

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 5, 2:25 pm, Reinier Zwitserloot <reini...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Apple might have less market share at this point compared
> to android, but I'm absolutely positive that apple has an enormous
> share of the *earnings* pie in the phone world.

According to these stats, Apple has had the most profit in the mobile
phone sector for two years:
http://www.asymco.com/2010/10/30/apple-as-mobile-phone-vendor-first-in-profit-second-in-sales-and-fourth-in-units/

> The same principle goes for PC sales:
> Apple has decent market share, but if you look at the % of the total
> pie that apple claims for itself on PC earnings, I believe they are
> hovering around the 50% mark.

In the U.S. home market, Apple now has the dollar share lead according
to IDC with 29.8% (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/23/mac-
shipments-outpace-market-3-to-1/). This figure can be disputed; in
that case, Apple has around 20% dollar share then, slightly behind
HP. In July 2009, Apple claimed 91% of PC costing $1000 or more in
the U.S. - and I doubt this has changed much since then.

> Its true that recently it looks like they may be less beholden to this
> principle of late (the iPad was very cheap), but other than the iPad
> I'm not really seeing it.

Apple's gross margins have been down recently to around 36% - they
used to be around %40 (http://www.mysmartrend.com/news-briefs/news-
watch/apple-shares-drop-late-trade-gross-margin-warning-aapl). That's
mostly due to aggressive iPad pricing and the iPhone 4 being more
expensive to produce.

> If market share was the primary goal, they'd have simply packed it in
> and acquiesced to verizon's demand; they'd have built a CDMA iPhone,
> added an undeletable verizon app, stuck a verizon logo on the back,
> and shipped em out to tens of millions of new customers within the
> first quarter of sales.

Even though Cedric's initial assumption (at 10% market share, you get
twice the profits of a 5% market share) was flawed, his conclusion is
not: Apple is after market share in the smartphone market and the
table space. Compared to the PC market, they aren't mature yet, so
Apple can get a big share there. That's why they are willing to
accept a lower margin and - if the rumors are correct - get a CDMA
iPhone out early next year. Even though I'm an all-Apple guy now, I
love Android because it makes Apple work harder. :-)))

> When developing android apps with widgets, they've used a strategy somewhat
> similar to swing's layout managers to make apps device-size
> independent (and introduced the 'device independent pixel', too),
> which was needed anyway to handle orientation switches. For games this
> is less relevant, which is probably why we see a lot more difficulty
> with android *game* apps dealing with the fragmentation.

I agree - for non-games, "Fragmandroid" is less of an issue than for
games (unless you're Fabrizio and a customer can't even start your
Android app at all ;-).

> But all platforms need to embrace it, and get tools out the door to
> help deal with it. Only way.

Yes, and Apple can improve their tools here, too (flagging newer API
calls when you specified older SDK versions for deployment). Hey,
here's business opportunity - scan Objective-C code for "dangerous"
API calls!

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 5, 6:47 am, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:

> I think a lot of people are totally misinterpreting Jobs' intentions.
> Apple's intentions might be what you're saying, but Steve Jobs only has one
> goal: market share.

I'm glad we're over the "Steve Jobs wants to kill web browsing"
argument.

[Vince O'Sullivan]

On Dec 6, 12:11 pm, Karsten Silz <karsten.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm glad we're over the "Steve Jobs wants to kill web browsing"
> argument.

Agreed. Whatever his ambitions are, killing of the web browsing is not
part of it. He merely want to control it. ;)

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

Fantastic links, Karsten. Thanks.

There's going for market share and going for market share. Apple wants
more market share - sure, who doesn't? But they aren't willing to give
up all that much for it. One successful startup recipe is to take a 10
billion dollar market, blow it to bits so that it becomes a 10 million
dollar market, which is fine as long as you control a big stake after
you're done pissing in the pool. That's the extreme, of course, but
Apple is not doing that even in the slightest. Apple is clearly not
willing to surrender significant long-term position to increase their
market share today, something that in my experience many other
companies in such a position _are_ willing to do.

For example:

- As far as I can tell, Apple and Verizon have been discussing for
YEARS about control. Apple didn't want to give up one millimeter of
it, and it looks like they're going to get their way (they control
updates, no verizon app on phone, no logo either).

- Apple is still making plenty of money per-phone. They could sell
them for far less, or even at cost. Android v. iPhone almost feels
XBox360 v. PS3 in scope, yet the latter were sold at a loss or at cost
(somewhat less so for XB360, but definitely true for the original
XBox), whereas especially the iPhone is not being sold even close to
'at cost'. They could, if market share was the _only_ important goal
right now. But commoditizing iPhones like that causes all sorts of
long-term damage.

Apple is not wrong at all in doing this, though. It's frankly
refreshing to see a company take heed of their long-term stability in
this day and age.

On Dec 6, 9:45 am, Karsten Silz <karsten.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Dec 5, 2:25 pm, Reinier Zwitserloot <reini...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Apple might have less market share at this point compared
> > to android, but I'm absolutely positive that apple has an enormous
> > share of the *earnings* pie in the phone world.
>
> According to these stats, Apple has had the most profit in the mobile

> phone sector for two years:http://www.asymco.com/2010/10/30/apple-as-mobile-phone-vendor-first-i...

[phil swenson]

If this happens your market share theory being the "one" goal is out the window:
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2010/12/06/verizon-wants-iphone-exclusive.html?ana=yfcpc

2010/12/4 Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com>:

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 12:45 AM, Karsten Silz <karste...@gmail.com> wrote:

Apple is after market share in the smartphone market and the
table space.

A lot of people seem to be missing the point I was making in my post.

I'm not saying that Apple wants market share, I'm claiming that Steve Jobs does.

It's become a personal obsession of his, a revenge he needs to get on Bill Gates, the only thing that he hasn't been able to achieve in his whole career. He doesn't care about money, he doesn't care about recognition or celebrity, he cares about market share.

Apple, as a company, obviously only cares about profit, and as some of you pointed out, it's not always easy to reconcile profit and market share.

Which creates an interesting situation in which a very successful company and its CEO now have different, and possibly conflicting, goals.

--
Cédric

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 6, 6:38 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:
> I'm not saying that Apple wants market share, I'm claiming that Steve Jobs
> does.

Congrats for having such a unique inside into Steve's brain! Very few
people have.

[CKoerner]

> It's become a personal obsession of his, a revenge he needs to get on Bill
> Gates, the only thing that he hasn't been able to achieve in his whole
> career.

I guess you know this because you are a personal friend of his for
many years and he has shared his own personal feelings exclusively
with you. Or maybe you're just repeating the garbage that you heard
someone else spout, who probably is no closer to the man other than
fact that share the same planet.

Yea I can see him just spending all day walking in circles thinking of
how he can revenge himself upon Bill like Khan upon Kirk. <rolls eyes>

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 10:04 AM, CKoerner <ches...@gmail.com> wrote:

> It's become a personal obsession of his, a revenge he needs to get on Bill
> Gates, the only thing that he hasn't been able to achieve in his whole
> career.

I guess you know this because you are a personal friend of his for
many years and he has shared his own personal feelings exclusively
with you. Or maybe you're just repeating the garbage that you heard
someone else spout, who probably is no closer to the man other than
fact that share the same planet.

Well, I have followed his career for about thirty years and I have read a couple of biographies, so I do know a little bit about him, yes.

That being said, I apologize for having an opinion, I hope you can forgive me.

--
Cédric

[CKoerner]

> That being said, I apologize for having an opinion, I hope you can forgive
> me.
> --
> Cédric

Then simply state it as such.

It's [my OPINION that this has] become a personal obsession of his, a

revenge he needs to get on Bill
Gates, the only thing that he hasn't been able to achieve in his
whole

career. [I THINK] He doesn't care about money, he doesn't care about

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 10:16 AM, CKoerner <ches...@gmail.com> wrote:

> That being said, I apologize for having an opinion, I hope you can forgive
> me.
> --
> Cédric

Then simply state it as such.

You're kidding, right?

--
Cédric

[CKoerner]

> You're kidding, right?
>

Are you joking?

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

iPods have, what, 90% to 95% of all market share of iPods? I think his
hunger has been sated.

On Dec 6, 6:38 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 2:37 PM, Reinier Zwitserloot <rein...@gmail.com> wrote:

iPods have, what, 90% to 95% of all market share of iPods? I think his
hunger has been sated.

Not for personal computers, where Macs are still stagnating at about 6% market share in the world.

--
Cédric

[Robert Casto]

And they won't grow because people don't want to pay what they ask for a Mac. I think Apple is just fine with that though. Lots of competition in the PC market, and you pay nearly double to get a Mac that is similar in hardware to other offerings. I'm not saying Window's based PC's are better. I've used a Mac Book Pro and really like it. It is just hard to justify the expense to businesses so they are going to buy more Dell's or Lenovo's and keep their costs down.

2010/12/6 Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com>

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group.
To post to this group, send email to java...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.

--
Robert Casto
www.robertcasto.com

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

Mac marketshare is stagnating?

Crap. Am I using the parallel universe communicator device again?

On Dec 6, 11:41 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 4:32 PM, Reinier Zwitserloot <rein...@gmail.com> wrote:

Mac marketshare is stagnating?

Crap. Am I using the parallel universe communicator device again?

<shrug>

They are at about 6% market share worldwide, so if they haven't technically been stagnating, they haven't skyrocketed either.

--
Cédric

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 7, 2:15 am, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:
> They are at about 6% market share worldwide, so if they haven't technically
> been stagnating, they haven't skyrocketed either.

According to the "Back to the Mac" event in October, Macs have 20.7%
market share in the U.S. consumer market (probably their strongest
market world-wide). Apple also claims that the Mac growth exceeded
the overall PC market growth for the last 18 quarters (http://
venturebeat.com/2010/10/20/apple-mac-numbers). So I argue that Mac
does increase market share, but since its overall share in the PC
market is so small, it doesn't change numbers that much.

[CKoerner]

> venturebeat.com/2010/10/20/apple-mac-numbers). So I argue that Mac
> does increase market share, but since its overall  share in the PC
> market is so small, it doesn't change numbers that much.

I'll take 20% market share with 80% profit share anytime over 80%
market share and 20% profit share.

[Chris Adamson]

Getting back to the issue of fragmentation, John Carmack recently
chimed in on the topic in an interview on Ars. /. pointed out
Carmack's dissatisfaction with the Android Marketplace, but he then
goes on to voice a concern about fragmentation:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/11/post-8.ars/

"Dealing with the user interface of managing space... there's a lot of
things that happen automagically for us on iOS that we'll have to deal
with particularly on the Android space. And that's not a lot of work
that's going to be huge heaps of fun to do. It's going to be dreary,
tedious work that I would certainly push on somebody else personally,
but I'm not sure that even as a company it's something that we want to
be involved in.

Even in the old days of the feature phone world, we always had EA
Mobile or JAMDAT to build the 300 or 400 SKUs that they had for all
the worldwide feature phone splits that we had from our four base
versions. And we may yet wind up partnering with somebody else to do
that level of broad support, but that's a little less satisfying when
we're doing something that's pushing the limit graphically, because
you don't have a second-tier company port your stuff to other graphics
architectures and expect it to remain cutting-edge"

[Carl Jokl]

I think one point which hasn't been mentioned about Apple is about
Elitism. Part of the attraction of Apple to some of the customers is
that people know that Macs are expensive and therefore Macs can be
status symbol / designer accessory. It is a bit like owning a sports
car or some other luxury vehicle. Part of the attraction is the
exclusivity. The more people have them then the less exclusive they
become. Apple has for a long time bought into the exclusivity and
tried to appeal to wealthily and successful people.

Perhaps there is a limit to which Apple would want to have market
share. If everyone owned a Mac then owning a Mac is no longer
exclusive. This does not seem to have proved a problem with iPhones
and iPods.

If Apple did have the majority of market share then I think they would
start to breed exclusivity with elite top end models. I wonder if we
would see again the equivalent of Graphite and Snow models where
people can easily see "My Mac is more expensive than your Mac." Maybe
gold iPhones or otherwise exclusive models? Who knows.

[CKoerner]

On Dec 7, 9:49 am, Carl Jokl <carl.j...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think one point which hasn't been mentioned about Apple is about
> Elitism. Part of the attraction of Apple to some of the customers is
> that people know that Macs are expensive and therefore Macs can be
> status symbol / designer accessory.

That isn't unique to Apple, that is everywhere. People drive
Ferraries, wear Rolex watches, frequent upscale restaurants, live in
upscale neighborhoods and have Alienware computers.

Elitist geeks run Linux and proudly show VIM and toss out arcane
command lines, they feel status in having a Jailbroken phone, etc etc.

Please, really, elitism as a criticism against Apple? Whats do you
think is next? The rise of Apple will force PC owners to sit in the
back of the bus? <rolls eyes>

[Moandji Ezana]

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 4:03 PM, CKoerner <ches...@gmail.com> wrote:

Please, really, elitism as a criticism against Apple?

Carl didn't criticise Apple.

Moandji

[Carl Jokl]

On Dec 7, 3:08 pm, Moandji Ezana <mwa...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 4:03 PM, CKoerner <chessm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Please, really, elitism as a criticism against Apple?
>
> Carl didn't criticise Apple.
>
> Moandji

I was just about to point that out but it looks like you beat me to
it.

All I wanted to say that growing market share is fine unless
Exclusivity is so important that having too much market share is
actually bad for your business. A decision has to be made. Does Apple
want to keep Macs exclusive or try to go mass market.

So far it seems iPods are pretty mass market and iPhones to some
extent however the desktop and laptop part of the business seems to
far to be kept exclusive. This may change or may no longer be
deliberately true.

I also mentioned that exclusivity can still exist within the Apple
space. No colour (color) based model differentiation exists anymore
but bigger is generally better in Mac models. Model differentiation
might be a bigger issue if Apple gets more market share.

It is just a thought. Not intended as criticism or praise but
marketing / strategy considerations.

[CKoerner]

My apologies for misunderstanding.

I still don't see anything your pointing out that doesn't exist in
other computer manufacturers, so I don't see your point.

[Carl Jokl]

Just as a quick little point. One Apple slogan has been "Think
Different". Ignoring the grammatical error, if Apple has 100% or even
the majority of the market share, buying a Mac would not be "Thinking
Differently". Saying that I don't know if Apple actively uses that
slogan anymore anyway.

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 7, 3:49 pm, Carl Jokl <carl.j...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think one point which hasn't been mentioned about Apple is about
> Elitism.

Generally, Apple products are more in the "luxury item" category - and
there having the majority market share may be bad. However, being the
market share leader in music players in some countries hasn't hurt
Apple's image, I think. Maybe they just have a strong brand or good
marketing or both. :-)

[CKoerner]

It was an ad slogan created in 1997 and discontinued in 2002.

[CKoerner]

> Generally, Apple products are more in the "luxury item" category

I think the description "Luxury Item" is flawed. Just because you can
find similar products for a lower price doesn't make it a 'Luxury'
item. Your TV, I can find cheaper TVs. Your Car, I can find a cheaper
car. Your camera, I can find a cheaper camera.

Apple products have a given price range, and you can find cheaper
similar items, but to say the 'cost' is higher than it needs to be by
labeling it a luxury is totally objective. by that measure 90% of
todays computers are 'luxury' items.

[Alexey Zinger]

If a product competes in a certain consumer space and happens to be toward the expensive end of the scale, it tends to indicate that it's either a "pro-sumer" or a luxury product.  Industrial grade offerings tend to differ from luxury ones in their richness of features or lower cost of operation (high upfront cost, low overhead later).  It would seem that most Mac laptops would fit into the luxury moniker more than industrial.  It's not a bad thing in and of itself.  It is what it is.

 

Alexey

---

From: CKoerner <ches...@gmail.com>
To: The Java Posse <java...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tue, December 7, 2010 10:47:45 AM
Subject: [The Java Posse] Re: iOS fragmentation vs. Android fragmentation

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group.
To post to this group, send email to java...@googlegroups.com.

To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 1:00 AM, Karsten Silz <karste...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Dec 7, 2:15 am, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:
> They are at about 6% market share worldwide, so if they haven't technically
> been stagnating, they haven't skyrocketed either.

According to the "Back to the Mac" event in October, Macs have 20.7%
market share in the U.S. consumer marke

Leaving aside the highly disputed number you propose (check out more objective sources, ideally ones that don't have "Mac" in their business name, e.g. wikipedia), how does this contradict what I said above (which I quoted again fully for your convenience)?

--
Cédric

[Cédric Beust ♔]

Good point, one that reinforces what I was saying earlier.

Anyone who says that Apple wants to be different, "elite", "hip" and is only interested in a small fraction of the market as long as it remains "special" probably stopped paying attention in 2001, when the iPod came out.

The iPod is a monopoly, the iPhone is close to being one in the US. These days, if you want to "think different", you need to have a different phone than an iPhone because it's so widespread. Apple seems to be fine with this.

But suddenly, when it comes to Macs, they want to remain in a niche, they don't care about market share?

Come on. As I said in my blog post, this is post rationalization at its finest.

Apple tries every day to gain market share with its Mac line, but it's been failing so far, so Mac fans try to rationalize this by saying "bah, Apple is not interested in market share anyway".

That's just dumb.

--
Cédric

[Alexey Zinger]

By "I'll take," do you mean you-the-consumer or you-the-company?  As a consumer, all else being equal, high margins on products are nothing but money being pissed away for me.  For the parties on the other side of the counter, it's quite a different story, of course.  I find it amusing when I hear people say that one company is better than another in choosing between consumer products and use profitability as an argument for the high-profit entity.  Shouldn't it be the opposite?

 

Alexey

---

From: CKoerner <ches...@gmail.com>
To: The Java Posse <java...@googlegroups.com>

Sent: Tue, December 7, 2010 8:00:16 AM

Subject: [The Java Posse] Re: iOS fragmentation vs. Android fragmentation

[Moandji Ezana]

And then there's fake fragmentation nonsense like this about different button order: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/12/06/android-hardware

My favourite response comes from a flickr comment:
"Who cares? On my phone, the buttons are
in the same spot every time. Most people
upgrade their phone every 18 months, I
would guess they learn the new button
positions in a matter of minutes. The
only people having a problem with this
are tech bloggers who try out every new
phone."
http://m.flickr.com/#/photos/49361977@N06/5239115217/

Moandji

--
www.moandjiezana.com

Sent from my Android

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Moandji Ezana <mwa...@gmail.com> wrote:

And then there's fake fragmentation nonsense like this about different button order: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/12/06/android-hardware

Yeah, typical Gruber passive aggressive anti-Android rhetoric.

He will change his mind if ever the iPhone or the iPad comes up with a second hardware button, at which point he will probably say that it's the most insanely genius thing that Apple has ever produced.

Given Apple's history with the right mouse button, I wouldn't hold my breath, though :-)

--
Cédric

[Casper Bang]

Hehe Steve will just say "We've found a way to place a second button".
I still think that the button issue is the true reason for why iPhone
lacks multitasking!

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 7, 8:24 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 1:00 AM, Karsten Silz <karsten.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Dec 7, 2:15 am, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:
> > > They are at about 6% market share worldwide, so if they haven't
> > technically
> > > been stagnating, they haven't skyrocketed either.
>
> > According to the "Back to the Mac" event in October, Macs have 20.7%
> > market share in the U.S. consumer marke
>
> Leaving aside the highly disputed number you propose (check out more
> objective sources, ideally ones that don't have "Mac" in their business

> name, e.g. wikipedia<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems>),

> how does this contradict what I said above (which I quoted again fully for
> your convenience)?

You're right.

[Moandji Ezana]

It seems like they're taking the necessary steps to reduce fragmentation issues:

"To make it easier for developers to distribute and manage their products, we will introduce support for device targeting based on screen sizes and densities, as well as on GL texture compression formats."
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/12/android-market-client-update.html

Moandji

--
www.moandjiezana.com

Sent from my phone

[Derek Munneke]

On 11 December 2010 22:00, Moandji Ezana <mwa...@gmail.com> wrote:

It seems like they're taking the necessary steps to reduce fragmentation issues:

"To make it easier for developers to distribute and manage their products, we will introduce support for device targeting based on screen sizes and densities, as well as on GL texture compression formats."
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/12/android-market-client-update.html

No so much reduce fragmentation, but at least deal with it.. sounds like we will get what the j2me shops have, the ability to say "this build will work on these devices", and not get a heap of negative comments about the app not working on a particular device. A bit surprised this wasn't in the market place from the beginning since Android always acknowledged fragmentation[1] , but the fact that you can get a refund on an paid app in the first 24 hours helped to mitigate it for consumers.

REF: [1] http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html

/derek

[Derek Munneke]

Fragmentation in Android devices is like fragmentation in Java API's - choice means fragmentation

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Derek Munneke <derek....@gmail.com> wrote:

but the fact that you can get a refund on an paid app in the first 24 hours helped to mitigate it for consumers.

It's fifteen minutes now.

--
Cédric

[Moandji Ezana]

On 12 Dec 2010 00:45, "Derek Munneke" <derek....@gmail.com> wrote:
>A bit surprised this wasn't in the market place from the beginning since Android always acknowledged fragmentation[1]

You could already target other features, such as gps.

Moandji

[Derek Munneke]

Are you saying there was an option when you publish an app to say this app is only valid for devices with GPS, and then devices without GPS would not see the app in the market, and hence user would not download it and then complain it didn't work on their device? I missed that option, please tell me how?

/derek 

[Derek Munneke]

2010/12/12 Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com>

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Derek Munneke <derek....@gmail.com> wrote:

but the fact that you can get a refund on an paid app in the first 24 hours helped to mitigate it for consumers.

It's fifteen minutes now.

So it is...http://www.gizmocrunch.com/android/4310-new-android-market

Time to update the FAQ http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=134336

Frankly i think 24 hours was too long .. but 15 minutes is way to short! 

/derek

[Moandji Ezana]

On 12 Dec 2010 01:44, "Derek Munneke" <derek....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Are you saying there was an option when you publish an app to say this app is only valid for devices with GPS, and then devices without GPS would not see the app in the market, and hence user would not download it and then complain it didn't work on their device? I missed that option, please tell me how?

Exactly. Off the top of my head, you put <use-feature> tags in the manifest. developer.android.com lists the available features.

Moandji

>
> /derek 

>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group.
> To post to this group, send email to java...@googlegroups.com.

> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+...@googlegroups.com.

[Derek Munneke]

On 12 December 2010 11:20, Moandji Ezana <mwa...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 12 Dec 2010 01:44, "Derek Munneke" <derek....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Are you saying there was an option when you publish an app to say this app is only valid for devices with GPS, and then devices without GPS would not see the app in the market, and hence user would not download it and then complain it didn't work on their device? I missed that option, please tell me how?

Exactly. Off the top of my head, you put <use-feature> tags in the manifest. developer.android.com lists the available features.

thanks; http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/uses-feature-element.html

/derek

[Moandji Ezana]

Sorry for not including the link before. I was on my phone and the task seemed too daunting.

Moandji

--
www.moandjiezana.com

Sent from my phone

[Moandji Ezana]

Karsten (or other iOS developers),

Does the iOS SDK have auto-adapting widgets like what Andy Rubin called "fragments" at the D:Dive Into Mobile conference?

Basically, in Honeycomb, you'd use a widget that would be displayed in two columns on a tablet, but split into two master-detail screens on a phone.

Seems pretty obvious, but I wonder if there are other, more powerful features to this kind of thing.

Also, wasn't something similar demoed at Google I/O during the Spring/GWT part of the 1st day keynote?

Moandji

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 13, 2:35 pm, Moandji Ezana <mwa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Karsten (or other iOS developers),
>
> Does the iOS SDK have auto-adapting widgets like what Andy Rubin called

> "fragments"<http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20101206/googles-andy-rubin-shows-...>at

> the D:Dive Into Mobile conference?

You don't. For iPad, you have some additional controls, like split
view or pop over, but those only exist on the iPad. So when building
universal applications, you typically have at least two sets of UI
definition files - one for iPad and one for iPhone/iPod Touch.

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 13, 2:35 pm, Moandji Ezana <mwa...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Karsten (or other iOS developers),
>
> Does the iOS SDK have auto-adapting widgets like what Andy Rubin called

> "fragments"<http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20101206/googles-andy-rubin-shows-...>at

> the D:Dive Into Mobile conference?

Maybe you need auto-adapting to battle the different tablet screen
sizes. The Galaxy Tab has a similar resolution as the iPad (1024x600
at 7 inch vs. 1024x768 at 9.7 inch), but has less than half the actual
screen size. So if you draw a button on an iPad-class Android tablet
and then on a Tab-class tablet, it seems to me that with the same
pixel size, the button indeed has about just a quarter of the "iPad
size" on the 7 inch tablet (half the height and half the width). With
computers such differences don't matter much, since the mouse pointer
is pretty accurate, but with touch interfaces they do. I assume this
is why Steve Jobs so famously and recently recommend to shrink user
fingers down to a forth of their size for 7 inch tablets.

It seems to me that in order to fix this, you either draw your button
at double the height and width on the 7 inch tablet or let Android
scale it up auto-magically. Please correct me if I'm wrong here - I'm
no expert in UI frameworks.

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 6:33 AM, Karsten Silz <karste...@gmail.com> wrote:

You don't.  For  iPad, you have some additional controls, like split
view or pop over, but those only exist on the iPad.  So when building
universal applications, you typically have at least two sets of UI
definition files - one for iPad and one for iPhone/iPod Touch.

Interesting that from this standpoint, Android seems less fragmented than iOS.

--
Cédric

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 13, 6:46 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:
> Interesting that from this standpoint, Android seems less fragmented than
> iOS.

Apple encourages you to think of the iPad as a different device, not
just a blown-up iPhone, and decided to implement it with different UI
controls. I believe a proper 10 inch Android tablet is not just a
blown-up 3.5 inch Android phone, either, so let's see how Google will
implement this. :-)

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 10:07 AM, Karsten Silz <karste...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Dec 13, 6:46 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:
> Interesting that from this standpoint, Android seems less fragmented than
> iOS.

Apple encourages you to think of the iPad as a different device, not
just a blown-up iPhone, and decided to implement it with different UI
controls.

The same could be said of Java ME: "Java ME encourages you to think of all phones as a different device for which you should write specific code".

Writing specific code is always an option, this can hardly be seen as an advantage. The hard part is giving developers the choice, and Apple's track record is not exactly stellar in this department.

--
Cédric

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 13, 7:13 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:
> > Apple encourages you to think of the iPad as a different device, not
> > just a blown-up iPhone, and decided to implement it with different UI
> > controls.
>
> The same could be said of Java ME: "Java ME encourages you to think of all
> phones as a different device for which you should write specific code".

In the grand scheme of things, Java ME just ran on phones. For me,
the iPad is not just a big phone, both in usage and UI, so citing the
iPad as an example of more fragmentation is like saying that
Silverlight is fragmented because you have to write applications
differently for Windows Phone 7 and a Windows PC.

[Cédric Beust ♔]

That's a good example of playing on the meaning of words.

The bottom line remains that you need to write two different versions of your code for the iPhone and the iPad.

--
Cédric

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 14, 3:44 am, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:
> The bottom line remains that you need to write two different versions of
> your code for the iPhone and the iPad.

Agreed. I think it's because its a different device, you think it's
because iOS fragmentation. I rest my case. :-)

[Karsten Silz]

On Dec 7, 8:31 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:
> Apple tries every day to gain market share with its Mac line, but it's been
> failing so far, so Mac fans try to rationalize this by saying "bah, Apple is
> not interested in market share anyway".

Apple fans may be rationalizing it, but Apple is not. Steve Jobs in
March 2008 (http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0803/
gallery.jobsqna.fortune/11.html):

"It was difficult for a while because for various reasons the Mac had
not been accepted by a lot of people, who went with Windows. And we
were just working really hard, and our market share wasn't going up.
It makes you wonder sometimes whether you're wrong. Maybe our stuff
isn't better, although we thought it was. Or maybe people don't care,
which is even more depressing.
It turns out with the iPod we kind of got out from that operating-
system glass ceiling and it was great because [it showed that] Apple
innovation, Apple engineering, Apple design did matter. The iPod
captured 70% market share. I cannot tell you how important that was
after so many years of laboring and seeing a 4% to 5% market share on
the Mac. To see something like that happen with the iPod was a great
shot in the arm for everybody."

[Joe Nuxoll (Java Posse)]

I rest my case with Karsten's case. The good news is that you get to
use all the same code for the underlying data structures. Only the UI
code is different for each - because a good user experience means
thinking differently about the interface for each device. Ideally, the
two versions should "feel" similar, but when you look closely they'll
be quite different.

[Fabrizio Giudici]

On 12/16/2010 05:38 PM, Joe Nuxoll (Java Posse) wrote:
>
> I rest my case with Karsten's case. The good news is that you get to
> use all the same code for the underlying data structures. Only the UI
> code is different for each - because a good user experience means
> thinking differently about the interface for each device. Ideally, the
> two versions should "feel" similar, but when you look closely they'll

> be quite different.i
I say my idea, even though I've not bought a tablet yet (and
unfortunately I have to wait for a good deal of money that my customers
owe me and are paying in delay :-(
For my app, I find it completely reasonable to have a different UI for a
larger display. I agree with Joe on that. If usability drives me to
change the UI, I don't consider it fragmentation.
I consider fragmentation mostly non UI code that I *have* to change to
deal with different devices, or operating system versions.

--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici - www.tidalwave.it/people
Fabrizio...@tidalwave.it

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

This is just bollocks, sorry, no other word for it.

(1) Mac market share is growing very rapidly compared to for example windows. If you don't think so, _you_ are the one rationalizing things. See pretty charts here: http://gigaom.com/apple/mac-market-share-surges-in-u-s/

(2) If apple actually wanted to go for market share, they'd start by releasing a notebook that's a heck of a lot cheaper than the current cheapest offering. Unless you wish to make an argument that apple is incapable of making them any cheaper than they are now, for some reason. The cheapest mac portable is $999, and the cheapest non-portable is the mini at $699. I couldn't find one that's from this month, but there's plenty of hits from independent websites to apple's financial reports, which show that apple makes a lot of profit on a single mac unit. They can drop the price significantly if they want to blow up their profit margins, and its rather clear to me that plenty of parts on a standard mac unit can be replaced by worse quality cheaper ones, if an even lower price is needed.

Is apple completely uninterested in market share? Of course not. But compared to just about any other company out there, apple cares less than they do. Saying apple "doesn't care" about market share is short hand for: "Does not put market share above long-term platform stability and profit".

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 4:24 PM, Reinier Zwitserloot <rein...@gmail.com> wrote:

This is just bollocks, sorry, no other word for it.

(1) Mac market share is growing very rapidly compared to for example windows. If you don't think so, _you_ are the one rationalizing things. See pretty charts here: http://gigaom.com/apple/mac-market-share-surges-in-u-s/

They're at 10% in the US, they were around 2% in early 2000. I would call that significant but not rapid. Oh and they're around 6% world wide, I don't see how you can make a case for a "rapid" growth with such a number, regardless of how low it started.

Besides, it's much easier to grow rapidly when you start at 2% than when, like Windows, you're already at 90%. Linux users love to say that their market share often doubles :-)

 

(2) If apple actually wanted to go for market share

Karsten just posted an interview from Steve Jobs himself in 2008 where he admits that they are going after market share, what more do you need?

--
Cédric

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

In a market as saturated and static as the PC world, going from 2% to 10% in 10 years is nothing to scoff at. We can chat about the meaning of 'rapid' all the long, but at the end of the day, claiming that apple is "failing" to get market share is a lie, and I debunked it.

I guess I didn't make myself clear. I was trying to suggest that when someone says "apple does not care about market share", they are trying to be brief. They could also give a 20-point essay with 15 references to explain in exquisite detail that they are in fact trying to suggest that apple cares less about market share than other companies, and in particular, less about market share than about certain other concerns, such as platform longevity and profit margins. However, if we all talked that way, that would get rather tedious. If you understand this, then you'll understand why Steve Jobs saying "I care about market share" doesn't change, at all, the notion that apple doesn't care about market share. With "doesn't" meaning: Don't care enough to prioritize it over profit and stability.

[Casper Bang]

Can we thus infer, that you are not convinced by Java's deeply rooted
philosophy of "write once, run anywhere" ...for UI-kits anyway?


On Dec 16, 5:38 pm, "Joe Nuxoll (Java Posse)" <jnux...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Rob Ross]

To me this just looks like MVC in the large. You have one data model, but multiple views for different purposes. I'm not sure why you would call that "fragmentation".

If I have some model data and I display it in one widget as a pie chart, and another as a line graph, have I fragmented my application code?

Rob

[Casper Bang]

But where do we draw the line? If I write my killer Twitter app in C#
but bind to different UI libs (WinMo7, MonoTouch and MonoDroid), is
that much different then?