Finally. The celebrity phone endorsement all the major manufacturers were vying for.

Brooks wrote:

Who is winning the phone OS war.

Google and Apple.

No one gives a fuck about developing for Windows mobile but it shares enough similiarity with android development.

First it's iPhone.

If you have budget you might do Android.

You'll only do Microsoft if you're specifically paid to do so or you see success on the other platforms first.

I can only see Android gaining more and more traction.

monkey wrote:

Might all turn around depending on how Metro / WP8 fares.  Devs could theoretically package the same app for use on PC, tablets and phones, if I've understood all this stuff correctly.

The Silverlight question is still hanging I think. If devs have used something else the porting is simple enough. Win 8/RT to phone should be simple enough if as expected WP8 takes the Win8 kernel.

Did you see this?

http://wmpoweruser.com/developer-demoes-real-time-windows-phone-7-vs-windows-8-game-play/




Also, it's Windows Phone not Windows Mobile.

Ftr I'd like MS to win because their junk looks the most to taste

Mod74 wrote:

google wrote:

You'll only do Microsoft if you're specifically paid to do so or you see success on the other platforms first.

The large selection of exclusive apps suggests you're talking out your trumpet again.

What are these exclusive apps you speak of?

WorKid wrote:

But that's a chart showing the quarterly sales of each OS.

It has no correlation to the amount of money/downloads from the various app stores.

WorKid wrote:

I think tablets are an interesting battleground too. I see a lot of cheap Android tablets flying.

Yeah, a guy in the office swears by his Galaxy tablet.

But if I'm honest, they're all much of a muchness. I have an iPad 2, a Blackberry Playbook and a Kindle Fire. The fire is by far the worst of the bunch, but that's nothing to do with the OS and all to do with the hardware.

dynamiteReady wrote:

Answering your own question there, dude... Piracy plays a strong part in the adoption of these things

Is that still true?

The only recent example I can think of is the PSP which had massively high piracy rates and failed as a result.

I liked my Galaxy S2 but the reason I moved back to iOS was because of it's app store. The ease of use and bulletproof in software just doesn't exist anywhere else right now. 

Google play (is that what it's called now) is a sad, sorry state of affairs at the moment.

dynamiteReady wrote:

google wrote:

I liked my Galaxy S2 but the reason I moved back to iOS was because of it's app store. The ease of use and bulletproof in software just doesn't exist anywhere else right now.

Don't get me wrong... I'm very happy to see this business model work so well. But for all it's (iTunes... or whatever) high profile success, it's no where near as lucrative as what Bill Gates did almost 25 years ago, and what Google's doing now ('hand off' brokerage).

If Google could get the store to work as well as Apple's and have some way to protect itself against the nasty gubbins, I think you'd see a lot more people invest.

The commonly held belief about Android is that there's no money in it. That might be a fallacy but its widespread enough amongst devs that they don't give it their main focus. 

Not just piracy, its also about the number of free apps that a paid product competes against. 


Android has the most users but comparatively fewer prepared to pay any money (did an edit on that sentence). That's probably down to the comparatively lower cost of most of the products (i.e. they have more cheapskates buying the phones in the first place). Its also due to the nature of the market (multiple vendors racing to the bottom), the perceived problems in rolling out an app amongst multiple devices running different / tweaked versions of the OS and piracy. 

So Apple has fewer users but higher spending per user. 

MS is using Apple's locked down model of app selling, has minimum criteria for hardware that make it easier to target different phones, but less users. So it wouldn't need to overtake Android to start getting higher priority from devs. Just start gaining a sufficiently large share. Then its inherently easier and more profitable market will take care of the rest. If they can get 20-25% of the Western market, you might start to see Android slip to 3rd in developer's priorities. 

That's the theory anyway. 

From my experience of trawling through job ads, most of the Android dev focus seems to be on providing companies with 'mobile solutions'. There's not many people out there thinking they can make a go of producing an app themselves and charging for it. Not the case with iOS.

I have a Nokia Lumia 800 and its a very stable phone. The wifi, bluetooth everything just works without any mucking around really. 

As for the apps, you could argue that there isn't as many and there aren't all the amazing apps you would expect to see on a high end Apple or Android. 

I did find though that I collected apps on my LG Optimus but didnt really play that many of them. Like GTA when it came out - It was like - ooooh GTA! ill get that.  Its still an oldish game and I can play better on my PS3.  I found my interest waned quite quickly.  there were so many on my phone that I ended up giving very little of them the time they deserved. 

I get access to gmail, FB, twitter, Linkedin. shopping list, bbc news. I dont really need anything else.

Wife's looking to get a Galaxy Note. Had a play with it in the shops today, looks amazing. Big, yes, but amazing.

Anyone used one for real?

Funkstain wrote:

Finally, there's the sheer choice of hardware. The HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy S3 destroy the iPhone 4S in almost all respects, it's not even funny.

I'm not an expert on such things but I would imagine the huge range in specs is another reason devs have a preference for developing for the iPhone, which is largely standardized within it's range.