Why Do Americans Hate Android And Love Apple?

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

Why Do Americans Hate Android And Love Apple?
Worldwide, Android rules. But here in the U.S., Android gets derided as a "ghetto" product. And you know what that means, nudge nudge wink wink.
    Dan Lyons
    Jan 29, 2013

The numbers tell an incredible story. Worldwide, Android has 75% market share in smartphones, versus 15% for Apple, according to IDC. But in the United States the iPhone still rules, accounting for 63% of smartphone sales at Verizon and an amazing 84% of smartphone sales at AT&T.

In Asia, affluent young buyers are dropping the iPhone and turning to Android devices, particularly those made by Samsung, Reuters reports. One marketing manager in Bangkok says Apple products have become like Louis Vuitton handbags, something that once was considered luxe but now is commonplace.

But here in the States Android still lags far behind...

If Android is so popular, why are many apps still released for iOS first?
Google-powered devices are selling like hot cakes, but some developers still find Apple's platform a tastier prospect. Here's why – and how it's changing
    Stuart Dredge   
    theguardian.com, Thursday 15 August 2013 16.30 BST   

Android is big. Really big. According to research firm Gartner, 79% of all smartphones sold between April and June this year were running Android: 177.9m handsets compared to Apple's 31.9m iPhones.

Another research firm, IDC, estimates that 62.6% of tablets that shipped to retailers between April and June were running Android: 28.2m devices versus 14.6m iPads.

Meanwhile, Google says that more than 1.5m new Android devices are being activated every day, it's nearing 1bn activated in total so far, and that by the end of this year that total will include more than 70m Android tablets.

Big. Yet a lot of apps still come out for Apple's iOS first or even exclusively...

Apple's "walled garden" and "protect dumb user from doing something unsafe" philosophy is starting to bite their a$$ hard...

An iPhone Lover’s Confession: I Switched To the Nexus 4. Completely.
   Ralf Rottmann - 1/04/13 9:03am

...This also is the area where I was most disappointed when Apple introduced iOS 6.

In fact, I think iOS has reached a point where usability starts to significantly decrease due to the many workarounds that Apple has introduced. All of these just to prevent exposing a paradigm like a file system or allowing apps to securely talk to each others. There is a better way of doing this. Apples knows about it but simply keeps ignoring the issues. One can see the most obvious example when it comes to handling all sorts of files and sharing.

Let's assume I receive an email with a PDF attachment which I'd like to use in some other apps and maybe post to a social network later.

On iOS, the user is forced to think around Apple's constraints. There is no easy way to just detach the file from the email and subsequently use it in what ever way I want. Instead, all iOS apps that want to expose some sort of sharing feature, do have to completely take care for it themselves. The result is a fairly inconsistent, unsatisfying user experience.

On iOS, you might use the somewhat odd "Open in…" feature – in case the developer was so kind to implement it – to first move the file over to Dropbox, which gives you a virtual cloud-based file system. If you're lucky, the other app, from which you want to use the file next, offers Dropbox integration, too, so you can re-download it and start from there. All because Apple denies the necessity of basic cross-app local storage.

On Android, it's really simple.

I can detach the file to a local folder and further work with it from there. Leveraging every single app that handles PDF files. In case I receive a bunch of mp3 files, I can do the same. And every app that somehow can handle audio playback, can reuse those mp3 files.

Another great example: Sharing stuff on social networks. On iOS, I have to rely on the developers again. Flipboard, as one of the better examples, gives me the ability to directly share with Google+, Twitter and Facebook. On my Nexus 4, I have 20+ options. That is, because every app I install can register as a sharing provider. It's a core feature of the Android operating system.

But it goes even further: On Android, I can change the default handlers for specific file types – much like I'm used to from desktop operating systems.

If, for example, you're not happy with the stock Photo Gallery application, that shows up whenever an app wants you to pick an image, you can simply install one from over a hundred alternatives and tell Android to use it as its new default. The next time you post a photo with the Facebook app – or have to pick an image from within any other app – your favorite gallery picker shows up instead of Android's own.

All of this is entirely impossible on iOS today. I've stopped counting how often I felt annoyed because I clicked a link to a location in Mobile Safari and would have loved the Google Maps app to launch. Instead, Apple's own Maps app is hardcoded into the system...

P.S. I am developing my application exclusively for the Kitkat version of Android, which has 30% market share of Nov. 3, 2014, and projected to exceed 50% within 6 months[1].

[1] http://www.dailymobile.net/2014/07/09/kitkat-soars-to-market-share-high/
     http://www.mobileburn.com/23438/news/kitkat-rides-to-huge-android-market-share
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Android_historical_version_distribution_-_vector.svg

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[UnunoctiumTesticles]

Open source Android is very important if you care about free market driven "net neutrality" (not this political "net neutrality" bullshit which is just a lie to enslave you and eliminate "net neutrality").

Perhaps Americans love iPhone because they've become socialist pigs. My prior post upthread shows how the highly regulated ("walled garden") iOS is falling way behind due to its paranoid top-down regulated design. This is the failure that comes to socialists who think they need to top-down regulate everything.

...

I see my recent writings on this subject made all the same points that Eric made in 2008 as follows.

Eric S. Raymond's (the progenitor of the term "open source" in the infamous essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar") past writings about "net neutrality":

....

Why Android matters
Posted on 2008-11-12 by Eric Raymond

...   

I’m going to start with the relatively far future, like five or even possibly ten years out, because I’m pretty sure my projections for it are very similar to Sergei and Larry’s and that they are what is actually driving Google’s corporate strategy.

Cellphone descendants are going to eat the PC...

...

Now. You are Google. You make your money by selling ads on the most successful search engine in the world. One of your strategic imperatives is therefore this: you cannot allow anyone to operate a technological or regulatory chokepoint between you and people doing searches, otherwise they’ll stunt your earnings growth and siphon off your revenues. That’s why you ran a politico-financial hack on the Federal auction of radio spectrum to ensure a certain minimum level of openness. And that’s why you are [Google is], very quietly, the single most determined and effective advocate of network neutrality. [note Eric is referring to free market driven "net neutrality" not the political lie "net neutrality" which is actually the way to end "net neutrality"]

Now, combine these two visions and you’ll understand why Google is doing Android. Their goal is to create the business conditions that will maximize their ad revenue not just two years out but ten years out. Those business conditions are, basically, an Internet that is as friction-free, cheap, and difficult to lock down as the underlying technology can make it.

Under this strategy, Android wins in multiple ways. In the longer term, it gives Google a strong shot at defining the next generation of dominant computing platforms in such a way that nothing but customer demand will be able to control those platforms.

In the shorter term, it outflanks the Baby Bells. As web traffic shifts to Googlephones (and things like them), telco efforts to double-dip carriage charges by extracting quality-of-service fees from Google and other content providers will become both technologically more difficult and politically impossible. By depriving them of the ability to lock in customers to gated and proprietary services, Android will hammer both the wire-line and wireless telcos into being nothing but low-margin bit-haulage providers, exactly where Google wants them. (A leading indicator will be the collapse of the blatant absurdity that is the ring-tones market, doomed when anyone can hook MP3s of their choosing to phone events.)

As bad as this sounds for the telcos, Microsoft gets outflanked and screwed far worse...

...

One of the coolest things about this chain of dominoes is that Google itself doesn’t have to win or end up with control of anything for the future to play out as described. It’s not even necessary that Android itself be the eventual dominant cellphone platform. All they have to do is force the competitive conditions so that whatever does end up dominating is as open as Android is. Given that one of the largest handset makers is already being forced to open source their stack for other reasons (Nokia figured out that they can’t afford to hire enough developers to do all their device ports in-house) this outcome seems certain.

For the open-source community, it’s all good. The things Google needs to do with Android for selfish business-strategic reasons are exactly what we want, too. This isn’t an accident, because we’re both pulling in the direction of reducing the effects of market friction, transaction costs, and asymmetries of power and information. If Google didn’t exist, the open-source community would need to invent it.

Oh. Wait. We did invent them. Where do you suppose Sergei and Larry came from? Why do you suppose they’ve been running Summer of Code and hiring a noticeable fraction of the most capable open-source developers on the planet? Well, here’s a flare-lit clue: before those two guys [Sergei and Larry Page] were famous, they sent me fan mail once.

That’s why I think those two know exactly what they’re doing. And that, if it’s true that their business strategy requires them to be open source’s ally, I think I can be allowed a guess that they chose their business strategy so that would be true. “Don’t be evil”; they’re not angels, but they’re trying.

And, from where I sit? All I can say is this: Bwahahaha. The sinister master plan for world domination – it is working!

...

You can do whatever you please. I'm backing the side that's the most right.

No little retarded grasshopper, you are fostering the takeover by corporations in cahoots with government corruption.

...

You are apparently too retarded to understand that "net neutrality" existed as a natural result of the free market and Obama is preaching that we need government to sustain or implement (regulate) the concept, which is a fucking lie and how they will actually destroy the concept.

Those who are bitching about not having net access in their communities are either wanting some subsidy from the government to drive service to their uneconomic rural location or their community is already suffering from lack of competition due to over regulation and regulatory capture by the vested interests. The free market did not fail to provide "net neutrality". Adding more government regulation only makes it worse!

You pontificate about shit which you don't know about, because ... well let the progenitor of the term "open source" explain it to you:

Those who can’t build, talk

Those who can’t build, talk
Posted on 2011-07-28 by Eric Raymond   

One of the side-effects of using Google+ is that I’m getting exposed to a kind of writing I usually avoid – ponderous divagations on how the Internet should be and the meaning of it all written by people who’ve never gotten their hands dirty actually making it work. No, I’m not talking about users – I don’t mind listening to those. I’m talking about punditry about the Internet, especially the kind full of grand prescriptive visions. The more I see of this, the more it irritates the crap out of me. But I’m not in the habit of writing in public about merely personal complaints; there’s a broader cultural problem here that needs to be aired.

Eric like myself was actually active in building the internet:

• Eminent Domains: The First Time I Changed History
• World Without Web
• A world without “ESR”
• Eric's GIF code in nearly every open source software in the world. He reminisced about it.
• He also did work on libpng that nearly every open source software uses
• Android development pulls hot chicks. Who knew?
• Emacs git conversion is done at one month from his 57th birthday.
• An Open Letter to Chris Dodd
  
  

  I’m talking about the actual engineers who built the Internet and keep it running, who write the software you rely on every day of your life in the 21st century.
  
  I’m one of those engineers – you rely on my code every time you use a browser or a smartphone or a game console. I’m not exactly a leader among them as you would understand the term, because we don’t have those and don’t want them. But I am a well-known philosopher/elder of the tribe (I’ll name two others later in this letter), and also one of our few public spokespersons. In the late 1990s I helped found the open-source software movement.

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

Ostensibly iOS (iPhone) chose HTML5, but Android OS will be the victor over HTML5.

[blablahblah]

Apples and apples.

Perhaps Americans love iPhone because they've become socialist pigs.

I'm told that the build quality is actually pretty good.

Educate yourself:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/1/

[5ick3uffalo]

What baffles me is that Blackberry has only 2.5 % marketshare in the US

Blackberry OS10.3 is simply awesome and I love my Z10 and Q5

Posted From bitcointalk.org Android App

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

Perhaps Americans love iPhone because they've become socialist pigs.

I'm told that the build quality is actually pretty good.

I have a new $240 (mid-range) Samsung. The hardware build quality is excellent, but the built-in software sucks (I have laundry list of usability design flaws piling up in my programming TODO list)! Koreans appear to not be very good at user interfaced software (noticed this on a Samsung feature phone in the past too). I am doing something about this now, programming feverishly and soon will have a new Android app out to replace this crappy bundled Contacts, Messager, and Dialer. I expect millions of downloads on Google Play.

Educate yourself:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/1/

Indeed I noticed this on the Google text-to-speech service that is bundled. But the awesome structural design of Android OS is anyone can offer a drop-in replacement ContentProvider, Service, Intent, or Activity.

Sorry Google has let the open source cat out of the bag and there is no way for them to put it back in the walled garden where the iPhone (and HTML5) is. There is no comparison. Android OS will stomp iOS into the dust. iOS is a dead-end and within 5 years it will be in single-digit market share (and your iPhone will be an expensive paperweight), which is a death spiral.

I am programming the OS so I know what I speak. You don't.

P.S. I think Google knows they can't reel it back into a walled garden and doesn't want to. They are just trying to gain enough leverage to force licensees to upgrade to the latest versions of the OS in order to prevent the fragmentation that had plagued Android versus iOS. And this seems to be working with Kitkat at 30% Android share and projected to surpass 50% within 6 months.

http://commonsware.com/blog/2014/04/09/storage-situation-removable-storage.html

Since Android 4.2, there has been a request from Google for device manufacturers to lock down removable media. Generally, this was ignored.

For Android 4.4, Google amended the Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) that device manufacturers must comply with in order to ship a device containing Google’s proprietary apps (e.g., Play Store, Maps, Gmail; otherwise known as “GMS”). Quoting Dave Smith:

However, new tests were added in CTS for 4.4 that validate whether or not secondary storage has the proper read-only permissions in non app-specific directories, presumably because of the new APIs to finally expose those paths to application developers. As soon as CTS includes these rules, OEMs have to support them to keep shipping devices with GMS (Google Play, etc.) on-board.

[UnunoctiumTesticles]

I’d feel facetious and subject to accusation of being non-objectively biased if I did not acknowledge some serious security theatre I submitted an Android Issue on today.

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=80335

Documentation states, “There is no security enforced with these files. For example, any application holding WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE can write to these files.”

I understand files stored in the returned directory can be accessed by the user via explicit actions such as by connecting the device to a computer via USB or removing the SD storage card. Thus security can not be guaranteed in all cases for these files.

However, there is a critically important scenario where security can and should be provided.

Users may install an app and despite approving the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission, not realize they have just enabled that app to corrupt the data files of other apps that have stored external data files. Users are not programmers and thus do not think in terms of the implications of obscure logic. They may think that particular write permission gives that app permission to write date for itself to the external directory, but not presume it enables that app to corrupt the external data of other apps. Why should the user presume Android was designed stupid?

In other words, the user likely views the write permission as a way for the user to get access to those data files with those aforementioned explicit actions, but not as permission to do unnecessary harm. The Unix design principles of least surprise and rule of silence apply:

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2878339

There is simply no reason to enable a trojan app to apply social engineering to trick the user into enabling something the user has no reasonable reason to assume would happen.

For example, I would like to store an SQLite database on the removeable media because it enables the user to be sure that data has no traces even after being deleted. And because it enables the user to instantly remove that data from the system in a heartbeat in an emergency.

And I think this is a very piss poor Android design that the user could unwittingly enable a trojan that would corrupt their data.

Also note that many or most users are oblivious to the meaning of security permission prompts and confirm them always.

In other words, WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission should only apply to Environment.getExternalStoragePublicDirectory) directories. Since Kitkat it is no longer required for writing to the app’s own private external directory.

[BitMos]

[dave 003]

it is well known, the americans prefer all that glitters 

[BitMos]

the 6 is beautiful.