The tone of the article is odd. The introduction is borderline hostile but from the rest of the piece it's clear that here is someone who has not only bought an Android device, but put a bunch of time into it.
In terms of the list of must have apps my impression was two fold:
On one hand I was pretty underwhelmed. Maybe Charles Stross's primary use cases are different to mine but there seems nothing that impressive on his list. The office software looks nice (though less impressive is the hoop jumping to get it) but I think most people stopped being excited by document editing on the go way before iOS and Android came into being.
On the other though, thinking about what I have on my iPad and use, there are some nice little things there but I can't say any of them have changed my life or are indispensable to me.
The reality is that the massive bulk of what I do is covered off by the pre-installed apps - browsing, video, reading (where there are solid options on both platforms if you don't like the defaults), maps. Yes I can edit video or mess about with music creation on there, but it's not a great platform for either.
Perhaps it's just me but I wonder if the gap between app availability on the two platforms is a bit of a red herring at this point. It feels like we're still trying to work out what tablets are for, and while app evolution will be a big part of that, right now it's a perceived differentiator rather than one that has a major impact on usage.
EDIT: Removed a snippy last line on the grounds that it was a cheap and undeserved shot at the OP and his replying politely and ignoring it has made me realise I was being a dick.
1. I've seen OS's come and go since CP/M. I don't get all fanboy-ish over them if I can help it.
2. I'm more interested in utility than ideology.
3. (There is always one more point than you expect when you begin a list.) I was trying to call out the less common items I use, not the stuff everyone knows about and sees in every "ten vital utilities for your Android" article on the web.
1. I've seen OS's come and go since CP/M. I don't get all fanboy-ish over them if I can help it.
Likewise, but doesn't this seem like a kind of a crucial fork in the road for consumer electronics technology?
The struggle between Apple (and Microsoft's) walled garden approach vs the Android bazaar seems to me to carry implications larger than previous rounds of this game, particularly when huge numbers of people are about to come online for the first time.
As one of the people users often come to asking "how do I root my XYZ", I must point out that while Android-the-platform sometimes feels like a bazaar, Android-the-product is a set of walled gardens that are slowly being organized under centralized management.
The device you purchase may be able to install apps from third-party sources, but you are still limited to "apps" (not the kinds of hacks and features you find in Cydia for jailbroken iOS devices, except for a few carefully-chosen extensibility points such as "custom input manager").
The device itself is often still locked down, which is why people cheer on companies like Motorola saying they will allow people to unlock the bootloaders on their devices (and then immediately must jeer at them when they find out their device isn't actually on the supported list).
Even at the OS level, the code is only open to a degree: getting patches in (and, to be clear: I succeeded early enough that some of my code is certainly on your device, so I'm not whining because I had code rejected) is painful because so much of the development is behind closed doors with releases to normal developers only happening right before actual product releases.
The result is that if you find regressions in new versions, such as 4.1 (as I recently did: an issue with how bionic's linker handles constructors) the chance that it will be able to be fixed before the release (and subsequent stagnation) is really small (which also burned 4.0: there were issues where multi-CPU APKs extracted the wrong files).
Meanwhile, Google is slowly replacing things that used to be open-source components of the base platform with closed-source "Google experience" apps (which vendors must license and then can't modify): the one that has seemed to cause the biggest stir (based on negative feedback from large hardware partners I talked to at I/O) being how Browser (which some vendors had tweaked to better take advantage of their video drivers) was replaced by Chrome (which, as many people don't realize this, I will point out is closed source on mobile: you can check out the test cases, but not the actual codebase to run on a device).
The result is that this "crucial fork", to some, certainly to myself, feels more like choosing "the lesser of two evils" when faced with a two-party political system: where both candidates are saying 95% of the same things you disagree with, but you have to vote within the 5% they differ where you hope your opinion matters.
Finally, even with all of that aside, even if you largely agree with one side of a debate, once you become a "fanboy" you lose your objectivity: everyone has some things they do poorly or that you disagree with, and to defend a position you have to admit those things to be trusted.
(Thereby, I am somewhat saddened by the idea by the idea this thread started with: that if someone has purchased a product--a far cry from buying into a vision--and then "put a bunch of time into it", possibly even carefully comparing it to alternatives over a long decision period, that they then must like it.)
Android is certainly far from ideal, but in life we very rarely get the ideal. At least with Android I can take my business to another vendor if I disagree with a policy. And it may not be as open as I might like but there is still a world of difference between AOSP and what it enables and what is possible on iOS only through illegal hacks.
(I feel like I should take offense at you calling what I do "illegal": while nothing is easily proven "legal"--one can always just sue and see if it sticks--jailbreaking iPhones does not break any obvious laws and even managed to get an explicit exemption from the strongest candidate, the DCMA.)
Perhaps it's just me but I wonder if the gap between app availability on the two platforms is a bit of a red herring at this point.
I've been saying this for a long time now. There's a rapidly diminishing return on app market size and the app experience gap between Android and iOS now for the average user is small.
This is less true for tablets, of course, but that won't take long to change if any Android tablet starts making real headway in the market.
And, as formidable as Apple is as an implementor I don't think they're going to be able to keep pace with the much more dynamic Android market as a whole. My 4S already feels like a relic compared to my S3.
I completely agree with you as far as functionality is concerned. Both platforms have an abundance of apps for almost every possible application (hah, I used 'app' and 'application' with different meanings in one sentence!)/
That said, I feel like design-wise Android apps are seriously hampered by the multitude of available screen sizes. I have seen too many apps that seem to optimize for small screens and look ridiculously under-polished on big screens. K9 Mail or most Twitter apps for example rely on tiny text in undecorated rectangles. This is clearly appropriate if you want to cram as much information as possible on a tiny screen but looks out of place on a Samsung S3. A gradient and some text color/size differentiation would go a long way there, but look distracting on a small screen.
Thus, I have trouble finding beautiful Twitter, RSS or Email apps for big Android phones. Of course, on iOS, there is not much choice for Email at all...
(If you disagree, by all means tell me about those beautiful apps! I am still searching!)
Well, obviously this is a matter of taste and certainly there are plenty of ugly apps on the store.
But one of the things I really like about well-designed ICS+ apps is that they really feel like an integrated part of a task-centric UI and not some over-fetishized designer's extravagance. I think Apple's embrace of skeuomorphism has encouraged a flood of hyper-stylized but not particularly ergonomic apps that each exist in their own little unique aesthetic universe.
For example, I'd much rather look at Tweet Lanes, even though it's pretty much a stock ICS app, than any iOS Twitter client loaded down with drop shadows and gradients and organic textures:
I still think app availability for iOS smartphones is better and significant (in terms of there being things that I'd hate to lose from my iPhone that I don't see on Android) but tablets I don't see what's selling one platform over the other from an app perspective.
Yes I think Garageband is amazing but I don't really use it other than to show people and go "isn't this amazing"...
I remember reading a piece DHH wrote about the default smartphone apps being where it was at was and thinking he was wrong, but I think from a tablet perspective that's where things are.
Curious to know what you like about the S3. I've got a 4S and have played with the S3 and aside from the size (which is a matter of personal preference) I can't say I saw anything on there I was especially impressed by. It's a nice phone (and from a design perspective I prefer it to the S2), just nothing that would make me think about trading up.
The top two things about the S3 are the much bigger screen and Swiftkey. Those two things alone would be enough to tip the scales for me but there are a bunch of other small things I appreciate.
1. The pull down menu to toggle wifi/gps/etc is much more ergonomic than fishing around in the settings menu on iOS.
2. Widgets can actually be a lot more useful than the typical clock/weather header. I have quick toggle widgets for alarms, a player widget for music etc.
3. Intents. I can share a picture directly to a dozen different apps, not only the ones with support manually coded into the parent app. I can choose my own default browser, mail client, photo editor, twitter client etc.
4. The photo gallery and integrated G+ uploading is so much better than iOS's photo app it's not even funny.
5. I can block incoming calls and SMS from people I don't want to hear from.
6. I can carry a spare battery if I'm going to be away from a charger for a long time.
7. I have a real choice of browsers and currently Mozilla Firefox Beta is better than Safari or Chrome (IMO).
8. I can buy books directly from the Kindle app instead of playing hopscotch around Apple's stupid rules.
10. Gmail is much better integrated and more functional than any mail client on iOS.
11. Background updating. I don't really think about app updates anymore. They just happen in the background. I can turn this off on a per-app basis if I really care.
12. The play store is a lot more pleasant to navigate and shows a lot more useful information than the iOS app store.
In the last six months a lot of holes have been filled. Pinterest, Path, Flipboard, Instagram etc. I don't really miss any apps from the iPhone.
Without doing a point by point, intents is certainly the one that most people look at Android and wish iOS had and background updates would be nice.
Most of the rest aren't a big deal for me personally but I can see why someone with different usage patterns and preferences would like the things you list.
> Android 4.1 is just about acceptable as an alternative to iOS. The user interface is rather less polished
If you're still not satisfied at this point, there's not much that can be done. Looking at any review of Jelly Bean by a major tech blog will tell you they're satisfied with the interface and that it's on par with iOS.
> Just because a major tech blog says something is true does not mean every man and his dog will agree, especially over something like UI polish.
That's exactly what I meant...my point is that a journalist's (supposedly) unbiased assessment is much more reliable than some random guy's opinion on the matter.
> I personally think it's much better compared to a few generations ago, but still has a few more rough spots than iOS.
I would love to know what some of these "rough spots" are. I don't own any Apple products, but happened to use a friend's iPad 3 yesterday, the first time I was using the device. After hearing so much praise on HN about how the interface was "so smooth", I was rather disappointed to find that basic things like text input and scrolling caused significant lag. Now I'm finding it difficult to take praise of iOS at face value.
Everyone is biased, I'd prefer someone like Charlie Stross who's love of Apple products is firmly on his sleeve to say "I've got a Nexus, it's pretty decent but..." because you know a) he's biased towards Apple, so he's comparing it to his base of reference, and b) if he says it's approaching the level of quality it's very good. A lot of tech bloggers hide behind 'we're unbiased!' and troll for clicks by changing their minds on a company/product every 6 months.
Not necessarily, the pace of technology is fast but not as fast as a flip-flop for click bait. I think one of the best examples is when Gizmodo went from being overwhelmingly positive about almost everything Apple produced, to being overwhelmingly negative in the space of about 2 weeks, whilst the rest of the tech press was giving Apple favourable reviews.
There's the pace of technology and then there's the pace of public opinion and there's few things that move faster than that.
That's my problem with these types of reviews. They use iOS and Apple's devices as a point of reference. Apple may have indeed earned that, but at some point they will just say they like "Apple's way" better than Android's way, because they've used it for so long this way, rather than simply making an objective observation of which way is better, or praising the advantages of using it the Android way.
For example many still say that iOS is "more intuitive", and that may still be true overall, or perhaps they just say that because Apple has nothing but icons on the homescreen, but there are also a lot of stuff that Android can do them faster and more in a more intuitive way than iOS, like activating Bluetooth, getting the weather, notifications, and so on.
And there's a lot of stuff on Android that's also unintuitive and fiddly, you can see where this goes. It's all about personal preference. I know people who swear blind that GUIs are terrible compared to the command line for getting anything done, and for them it's right and makes perfect sense. Trying to argue it is like trying to argue which shade of blue is the right shade of blue to be called blue (without referring to a Pantone guide).
I'd never heard of the name before, so I didn't know he was famous. In any case, he might be an accomplished writer, but I don't see how that makes him particularly qualified to comment on mobile devices and software.
He was a tech reviewer for Computer Shopper in the UK, and a Linux programmer. He has an admirable breadth of knowledge, which peeks out in his non-technical writing.
He's an ex-programmer and many of his stories (those set in the current era at least) have gadgets like palm pilots as key plot elements. So there's that.
Bought an iOS device some time ago (coming from Android) and I'm still trying to find anything "superior" to Android's UI. It's just a matter of taste.
I don't mind that the author prefers the iOS user experience, everybody can have his opinion on that. However, saying that Android is about acceptable as an alternative to iOS, it is just trolling.
> it tends to lack the design aesthetic of apps written by Apple fanboys who have been brainwashed with the Cult of Cupertino's desire for things to be functional, pleasing, and useful.
Pre-emptive counter-snark is something that seems enormously funny to you when you write it, but rather paranoid when you read it.
I guess ultimately there are just not many apps that are really necessary, apart from browser and ebook reader. Web apps are winning after all...
That said, are there any good children apps for Android? I mean apps for toddlers, no questionable "learning apps", just nice pictures that move when you touch them? It's the only thing that makes me think an iPad might be worthwhile to entertain my kid.
The Duck Duck Moose and Sesame Street apps are good. But for toddlers, iPad as much, much better. My toddlers, who have no trouble using iPad, have a terrible time with the Nexus.
What I loathe about my Galaxy Tab is the menu bar at the bottom. Impossible not to touch for a toddler, and with the blink of an eye he get's thrown out of the current app again.
My 19 month old lives one little game called "Animal Puzzle for Toddlers". It has got several simple puzzles where you have to place some animals on a drawing where they are missing. When you are fine there are balloons that appear on the screen which you can click making then explode. It's fun and simple.
There is a lite version, but the full version adds some more puzzles and it is very cheap (1$ if I recall correctly).
…or in other words, how to turn your tablet into a quite lackluster Unix laptop. Once you add up external storage and a bluetooth accessories (incl. crappy keyboards), are you really that far removed from an X-series Thinkpad (or one of those new-fangled ultrabooks), albeit with worse performance?
I just cannot see the point of trying to turn a tablet into a laptop. If the shift to mobile taught us anything wasn't it that one device can not adapt equally well to all tasks?
I really hope that this isn't a true "shift", but disregarding that, if you look just a few years back you had a PDA and a phone, now that's done by one "smart"phone (that, plus GPS and camera).
I'd say that most tablets certainly would be capable of doing that when it comes to raw power (hey, they're faster than SGI Indys), but the ergonomics are quite odd, which is a problem that Moore's law doesn't solve automatically. And when you're carrying your Android tablet in addition to an iPad…
But hey, there's been online IDEs, a lot of "distraction free" writing environments etc. for tablets, so the line to draw between tablet and laptop usage is obviously a very individual choice. And, well, as an emergency Unix shell connector even I can see the point, and I'm definitely in the "tablets are for consuming" camp.
One point would be so that you don't have to carry a laptop. If you need some things (e.g. terminal emulators) occasionally but not often enough to really justify lugging a full laptop around, then having that on your tablet could be valuable (even if not "as good" as the laptop experience).
I don't quite understand the 'Rotation Locker' link.
Android 4.1 includes a _very_ exposed button for that.
Pull down the notification area (works from all non-fullscreen apps) and it's right there, next to the settings button. In fact, it's probably the most accessible setting you get on that device.
So .. given that the pitch is "Rotation Locker makes it easy to lock or unlock automatic screen rotation" I've to say that this doesn't make sense.
The app _does_ seem to have a purpose though (with profiles tied to Locale/Tracker - or if you're stuck on an old version of Android). Just not a big one on the Nexus 7.
It amazes me that there is still no usable firewall on Android. Droidwall et al that require pre-configuration of apps with very limited granularity make no sense in an environment that regularly gets new software installed with unknown characteristics.
I believe LBE Guard allows you to sandbox any arbitrary Permission on android, and can be configured to ask you whenever a new (or existing) application is started. Requires a rooted device, but I found it to be effective.
In terms of the list of must have apps my impression was two fold:
On one hand I was pretty underwhelmed. Maybe Charles Stross's primary use cases are different to mine but there seems nothing that impressive on his list. The office software looks nice (though less impressive is the hoop jumping to get it) but I think most people stopped being excited by document editing on the go way before iOS and Android came into being.
On the other though, thinking about what I have on my iPad and use, there are some nice little things there but I can't say any of them have changed my life or are indispensable to me.
The reality is that the massive bulk of what I do is covered off by the pre-installed apps - browsing, video, reading (where there are solid options on both platforms if you don't like the defaults), maps. Yes I can edit video or mess about with music creation on there, but it's not a great platform for either.
Perhaps it's just me but I wonder if the gap between app availability on the two platforms is a bit of a red herring at this point. It feels like we're still trying to work out what tablets are for, and while app evolution will be a big part of that, right now it's a perceived differentiator rather than one that has a major impact on usage.
EDIT: Removed a snippy last line on the grounds that it was a cheap and undeserved shot at the OP and his replying politely and ignoring it has made me realise I was being a dick.