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by sabret00the 4896 days ago
This is actually pathetic reading.

> “You make a beautiful magazine for the iPad, and then you dumb it down for Android’."

and then you read

> "we pick movies from the iTunes store"

So essentially, it was about being lazy in the first place and opting for a close ecosystem.

2 comments

Agreed. They could, you know... Try to find a proper cross-platform solution. I also love their logic here:

"To give you some insight in how little uptake we saw on Android here are some statistics: for every Android user that downloads an Android magazine we have 80 iOS downloads."

Which is funny, because it's also possible that the Android/WP users are just going to http://thenextweb.com/magazine/ instead of downloading a dedicated application to provide "movies, sound, interactivity and content"... Last I checked, my web browser is fully capable of providing all of that already.

But iOS users could be using the web version as well ?

So it really doesn't seem that you're in a position to be questioning someone else's logic.

To finish off you hand-picked quotes "Producing for Android meant that we had to redo all that work because all our content was restricted to the iOS platform..." So it looks like they weren't being 'lazy' at all, rather it's about Android users, for whatever reason, being unwilling to download the magazine. Downloads in the region of 80:1 in iOS favour illustrate the issue precisely.
"because all our content was restricted to the iOS platform..."

They chose to restrict their content to iOS because of laziness; they did not want to look for a cross-platform solution. What do you expect Android users to do when you give them a pale imitation of a product that exists on iOS? Of course they're going to go elsewhere.

They said that they had to redo all the work. It took them 4 days per issue to complete the task as a result.