Android, not Apple, dominated the tablet market in 2013 - CSMonitor.com

[Robert Seastrom]

Hi Bill,

Was the kool-aid tasty?  It sure sounds like it.  There's a great irony in claiming that Apple = no innovation when they're the reason you have a tablet / smart phone in its current form *in the first place*.  If you were able to keep a straight face while typing that I salute you.

I have both Android and iOS devices within 3 feet of me.  Both of them have things to recommend them and both have things that drive me nuts (particularly some ill-conceived redesigns in iOS 7).  For the Android device the biggest advantage is the price point.  I have a fairly spendy tablet by Android standards (a 2012 Nexus 7) which I picked up lightly used from a developer friend for $85.  I'm pretty happy at that price, but if I'd bought it at full retail I'd be kicking myself for not spending a little extra on the iPad Mini.  But you can walk into Micro Center and pick up a reasonably acceptable Android tablet for $80.  Can't do that with Apple.  But lack of low-spec equipment from a vendor is not necessarily a minus - you probably use a Fluke or Simpson multimeter in preference to a sub-$5 special from Harbor Freight too, right?

User interface inconsistency among Android apps gives me new respect for the jackbooted thugs at the iOS App Store.  I mentioned this problem to a friend who's an Android developer and he got this hangdog look and said "yeah, there's a shortage of ready made UI elements let alone community consensus".  I mentioned this to Maitland a couple of weeks ago at Tacos - according to him the backstory is that ages ago Andy Rubin thought that this was something that would sort itself out in time and so he didn't force the issue while things were still malleable.  My response was to quote Rush (the band, not the blowhard):  "If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice".  For an operative example of what I mean, download Aldiko (a fairly popular e-book reader) and try to figure out how to adjust its own built in notion of what the screen brightness ought to be - it overrides the system's settings.  Hope your Google-fu is good.

Cyanogenmod is a cute set of modifications (a mix of good and bad, and pretty much all skin deep).  It's convenient that it comes pre-rooted, but I would not say that installing CM (which is marginally more difficult to install than Windows, though much quicker) gets you a pass as far as being an appliance operator goes.  Putting stickers and a wing on your car doesn't make you a race car driver either.  Installing CM did fix a video problem that I was having, but that's more attributable to rolling back to JellyBean from Kitkat than to CM per se.  By the way you noticed when installing CM that a *lot* of the environment that comes with a normal Android device is missing, because many of the Google add-on tools are held back and must be installed separately, right?  No Play store, no YouTube, no Chrome...

Done any software development lately?  You can develop for both platforms, and Apple's IDE is really quite snazzy.  There are several development environments for Android - one that is worth exploring for novices is App Inventor http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/
Actually publishing apps will get your "not an appliance operator" card punched, but I'll wager they'll look nicer and run better on iOS.

Anyway, that's my $0.02.  My loyalty is to sharp tools.  Keeping the iPhone.

73 de AI4UC

-r

On Mar 3, 2014, at 12:34 PM, William Bill Kisse <WA3GJD at arrl.net> wrote:

> I can only say Hurrah! as Apple is a closed system that caters to - in our jargon - appliance operators.
> 
> There is so much more that Android has and will accomplish as it's open source.
> 
> Closed systems = no innovation
> 
> Open systems = anything's possible
> 
> A great place to start with customization of Android is:  http://www.cyanogenmod.org/
> 
> 73,
> 
> Bill
> WA3GJD
>  
> William "Bill" Kisse
> 301-908-8279
> “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
> Margaret Mead, American Cultural Anthropologist  
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 
> From: Andre Kesteloot <andre.kesteloot at verizon.net>
> To: Tacos <tacos at amrad.org> 
> Sent: Monday, March 3, 2014 11:31 AM
> Subject: Android, not Apple, dominated the tablet market in 2013 - CSMonitor.com
> 
> http://m.csmonitor.com/Innovation/2014/0303/Android-not-Apple-dominated-the-tablet-market-in-2013
> 
> 73
> André
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