A five-minute Apple video “features a parade of high-profile, highly successful developers — Callaway’s Nicholas Callaway, Bottle Rocket’s Calvin (‘NPR’) Carter, Pandora’s Tom Conrad, ABC TV’s Skarpi Hedinsson, Illusion Lab’s Carl (‘Labyrinth’) Loodberg, and Wolfram Research’s Theodore (‘The Elements’) Gray — extolling the wonders of Apple’s SDK and the perils of developing for anybody else,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes for Fortune.
“‘It is that handset fragmentation, if you will,’ adds Hendinsson helpfully, speaking of an unnamed competitor,’that causes developers a lot of problems. Because you are now targeting individual devices,'” Elmer-Dewitt reports. “Then, just to nail home that it’s Google’s Android everybody’s talking about, Conrad pitches in: ‘It’s really evident in Apple’s APIs, in the developer tools, that you’re working with something really mature, not something that was invented two years ago.'”
Full article here.
Direct link to video via YouTube here.
On a related note, Bo Stone reports for AndroidGuys, “On the Android Market forums there is an uproar: many apps significantly suddenly dropped their counts. We already covered Market issues twice in the past week and Google even apologized to developers. However last night the first thing I noticed was that my “Credit Card” app disappeared from the market search. No, it wasn’t yanked. It can still be found by direct query… but it does not appear on search by name, by keyword or even when I click on ‘View more applications.'”
“My troubles didn’t stop there: just this morning I went on the Market and to my dismay immediately noticed that counts on my apps were down, way down, to the levels of March-April 2010,” Stone reports. “This also affected position on the top list for Hire*A*droid, which plummeted about 20 slots.”
Stone reports, “Being a programmer myself, I understand too well that no one writes perfect software. However, what disturbs me deeply is that there’s really no support system for the Android Market. The Market is not an open source so we have to rely on Google to fix any problems. Yet there’s no bug tracking, no support phone or even email or any way to file a problem ticket.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Why waste time trying to develop for something like Android which is destined to take a massive hit the moment Apple flips the switch on multiple U.S. carriers?
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Tim B.” for the heads up.]
