As competition grows, Apple's iPhone still has App Store advantage - Page 4

Originally Posted by mrochester

Yep, and that smaller supermarket, with a smaller range of items, but with less of the own brand value rubbish! This is completely pointless as we could just end up going round in circles here.

Originally Posted by addabox

What? I think what you've said here is pointless, because it doesn't appear to make any sense, but the larger point-- that while for any given market place any given consumer might use a small fraction of the wares on hand, they're likely to be using a slightly different small fraction-- seems incontestable, and leads inevitably to the conclusion that the larger the inventory, the more likely any given consumer is going find just the right mix of products,

I'm not goin' round in circles.

No, not true at all. Actually, it's something like over 40% of users have over 50 apps. There was a chart published a few days ago that had that, and I'm trying to remember where I saw it. It might have been in the NY Times, but I'm not sure.

Originally Posted by mrochester

And my point is that to find that 'right mix of products' you need to wade through pages and pages of junk, which is a waste of time, and as they like to say around here, time is money. You should be wasting no more time finding the apps that you need for your phone than you do updating and running a virus scanner on a Windows PC. A more concise selection of quality products means you can find your 'right mix of products' much more easily. It would be rather a double standard to say it's OK to waste time and effort siefting through the Apple app store, when it's patently clear around these parts that it is not OK to waste time updating and running virus software. Both are problems created by the makers of the product, yet somehow one is OK...

We are, because your analogy will keep on changing, as will mine to match it, and there'll never be an end to it.

Originally Posted by addabox

Lots of people claim this, but it's never made a bit of sense.

Do you worry about finding things to buy at Amazon because there's too much stuff? Do you "wade through" entire product categories just to see if there's anything that strikes your fancy?

Or you do what people have been doing for as long as there have been products? Do some research, have a general idea of what you're looking for, and go get it?

If you want to browse, fine, nothing stopping you. But what's stopping you from using the usual channels to figure out which apps might be worth having, and doing a simple search to go to straight to that particular app? You might as well complain that the iTunes store has too much music, and that Apple would serve its customers well by winnowing the selection down to a "concise" offing of "good" music in each category. I mean, how much time can a reasonable person spend listening to 30 second snippets of music, on the off chance you'll run across something you like?

It's just a mystery to me why people who want to down play the number of apps in the App Store as a competitive advantage act like just wandering around looking at apps willy nilly is the only possible way of dealing with it.




Really no analogy needed. Once you get past the silly idea that the App Store is an undifferentiated mass with no external way of identifying what you're interested in, it becomes obvious that more choice is better.

Originally Posted by addabox

Lots of people claim this, but it's never made a bit of sense.

Do you worry about finding things to buy at Amazon because there's too much stuff? Do you "wade through" entire product categories just to see if there's anything that strikes your fancy?

Or you do what people have been doing for as long as there have been products? Do some research, have a general idea of what you're looking for, and go get it?

Originally Posted by mrochester

Yes, it's completely ridiculous, but I'm only highlighting the double standard. If more choice is better, then why is it that we see people so vehemently support Apple's locked down OS, and their slim selection of hardware products? Why is it Dell, Microsoft and Google are constantly bashed for giving us 'more choice'? The great Android fragmentation, and so on and so forth. But wait, I'm confused, because I thought 'more choice is better'? Hmmmm, sounds a little too fishy to me, and just goes to show that as soon as an Apple logo is slapped on it, it's OK.

Originally Posted by mrochester

And my point is that to find that 'right mix of products' you need to wade through pages and pages of junk, which is a waste of time, and as they like to say around here, time is money. You should be wasting no more time finding the apps that you need for your phone than you do updating and running a virus scanner on a Windows PC. A more concise selection of quality products means you can find your 'right mix of products' much more easily. It would be rather a double standard to say it's OK to waste time and effort siefting through the Apple app store, when it's patently clear around these parts that it is not OK to waste time updating and running virus software. Both are problems created by the makers of the product, yet somehow one is OK...

Great! I'd like to see this statistic when you've found it.

Originally Posted by mrochester

Yes, it's completely ridiculous, but I'm only highlighting the double standard. If more choice is better, then why is it that we see people so vehemently support Apple's locked down OS, and their slim selection of hardware products? Why is it Dell, Microsoft and Google are constantly bashed for giving us 'more choice'? The great Android fragmentation, and so on and so forth. But wait, I'm confused, because I thought 'more choice is better'? Hmmmm, sounds a little too fishy to me, and just goes to show that as soon as an Apple logo is slapped on it, it's OK.

Originally Posted by melgross

I shouldn't have to as you haven't given any evidence that any of your stats are correct, but the info of the poll is in this month's MacWorld. The magazine, which I now have in front of me. I don't know if it's on their site or not. You can look if you want, but it is here in print.

20% have 1-10.
16% have 11-20
8% have 21-30
6% have 31-40
5% have 41-50
45% have 50+

That's from a poll taken in August.

Originally Posted by melgross

You keep saying "junk" without supporting that statement. Since you want others, such as myself, to support ours, please stop saying that until you CAN support it.

There is a greater percentage of Junk elsewhere, you can be sure. Just go read anything about the Android store apps and you will see that for yourself.

Should I give you the names of a bunch of App store apps, and have you try to find the same types in the Android store?

Originally Posted by mrochester

Yes, it's completely ridiculous, but I'm only highlighting the double standard. If more choice is better, then why is it that we see people so vehemently support Apple's locked down OS, and their slim selection of hardware products? Why is it Dell, Microsoft and Google are constantly bashed for giving us 'more choice'? The great Android fragmentation, and so on and so forth. But wait, I'm confused, because I thought 'more choice is better'? Hmmmm, sounds a little too fishy to me, and just goes to show that as soon as an Apple logo is slapped on it, it's OK.

Originally Posted by solipsism

I haven’t checked in months but the last time i counted I had more iPhone apps than I had Mac apps. it’s certainly worse now as I buy several iPhone apps per apps yet rarely add new Mac apps.

Originally Posted by addabox

Actually, we could go ahead and include the totality of any given product in any given category, particularly in the CE industry. How many portable sound systems are available? How many of them are cheap, disposable crap? How many digital photo frames? Programmable remotes? Random gee-gaws and pointless trinkets? Does that mean that the CE marketplace is worthless and impossible to navigate for the average consumer? Does Best Buy need to strip out all the dirt cheap, half assed ear buds and accessories so their shoppers don't become bewildered and disoriented?

Originally Posted by addabox

It would be interesting to take some kind of broad poll on exactly which apps people have installed. My guess is that would be substantial overlap for the first 50% or so, and then increasing divergence for each additional 10%, until you get that last 10% that's comprised of very low adoption rate apps that happen to work for a particular person.

It's that last 10 or 20 percent that make the case for having as many apps as possible to choose from.

Originally Posted by melgross

That's not the point. The point is that when an app is coded for a high amount of information density, it won't work properly on a much lower resolution screen. Not because it can't work, but because all that information can no longer be shown. Fine detailed text, for example, will be lost below the ability of the screen to resolve it. The program interface will have to be reworked for the different resolutions if they are too different. Apple will have a similar problem if they don't raise the rez on their iPhones and Touches in conjunction with a tablet release.

This means that the developer will need to have three different versions of the entire GUI for the program. Much more work, because the program was written and designed for that one resolution, and depending on the program, may not work well on a screen with a much lower resolution.

Google has no control over what these resolutions will be, or the cpu and gpu power behind them.

Apple has one standard for each entire generation of devices. So, at least, all currently selling devices will be coded for the same way. People owning older devices will understand that theirs will no longer be optimal. Apple will need to raise the rez, but likely only once, as there's no point going past a certain rez for such small screens.

It's why OS X's GUI couldn't work on a phone, and why, among other reasons, Win Mobile is so difficult to use.

But screen rez is only one among a list of differences between phones that Google will have no control over.

Palm is going to have a similar problem, but to a lessor extent. Already, the Pre and Pixi have different rez's. The Pixi can't display everything on the screen at once, or at a high enough rez. If they license the OS, as some have speculated they might, then they could be in the same boat Google is, unless they are stricter about how the hardware will be made.

Originally Posted by AsianBob

So the point that Google has simplified the resolutions to be one of 3 major categories and has the OS automatically scale for images and text isn't the point?

http://www.phandroid.com/2009/10/20/...droid-rebuttal

As Jeff (the developer quoted) says it's only a few minutes extra work to include image support. Nothing more than a diligent developer would have done in the first place. Also see the screenshot of one of his apps being displayed on all 3 screen sizes. Looks to me that the images scaled right and to the right location and the text isn't affected at all.

As I've said, all the recent Android phones officially announced for release (read: not speculated) have resolutions that fall into one of those 3 sizes.

Originally Posted by solipsism

Simplifying resolution changes are easy when you are dealing with the same size and aspect ratio. Change these up along with resolution and the situation becomes more complex. This is not as simple as Android devs try to make it out to be. Remember, these arent windows apps like on a desktop OS and its right out of the gate. This wont be so pretty in a couple years. I suspect well eventually see HW vendors standardizing within their own product line to establish some resemblance to order.