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by anigbrowl 5012 days ago
Android is second-rate because it's only in Jellybean that they've conquered the latency issues. People are using Android devices for passive consumption, rarely for any kind of content creation, because virtually all the content creators are and content creation software are already on iPad and have given up on Android, in much the same way that musicians almost exclusively used Macs for 10 years because nobody took audio seriously on the PC. That was OK because PCs had many other uses, but since tablets are more lifestyle than business devices, ceding all the early-adopter and tastemaker types to Apple was a huge mistake on Google's part.

Fragmentation is not that big of an issue among the Android users and developers I know. A craptastic multimedia stack was a much bigger negative.

I say this from a household with 4 Android devices and no Apple ones, incidentally.

1 comments

I run a startup, we do iOS and android development. I switched from iOS to android last year with the galaxy nexus, now back to the iPhone 5. I can tell you we spend a ton of time dealing with fragmentation. Here is the issue. It takes you something like 2x the front end time to test on some devices (40 or so, which we own some and use services and friends for others). After you finish and release, you get about 10x the support request for all kinds of random devices, and it is nearly impossible to debug without the device. Fragmentation is huge part of the effort in android. As a user, I found many of my favorite apps didn't work. I had to use my old iPhone 4 for music, as Spotify didn't work for bout the first 6 months I had my phone.
Totally - I only know a small subset of developers, and that was low on their list of complaints.