Woz Misquoted About Android Dominating iOS 251
bonch writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's quote that Android would dominate over iOS was widely covered by the tech press, but after seeking clarification, Engadget reports that Wozniak was misquoted by Dutch paper De Telegraaf. 'Almost every app that I have is better on the iPhone,' says Woz, claiming that he would never say that Android was better than iOS. 'I'm not trying to put Android down, but I'm not suggesting it's better than iOS by any stretch of the imagination. But it can get greater marketshare and still be crappy.' Woz has an Engadget account and has posted further comments to the linked article."
Re:News at 11 (Score:3, Insightful)
Clearly the problem is they pay people who fail to perform 8 million dollars. I would be willing to fail at that job for 3 million dollars.
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:4, Insightful)
That was supposed to be a joke, I highly doubt anyone who trades stocks even notices what The Woz says.
AAPL's current price is yet another sign the stock market makes no damn sense.
Re:Slashdot is just driving traffic to worthless s (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot is just driving traffic to worthless s (Score:4, Insightful)
So Engadget is the third-rate PR web site in this case? I hate to burst your bubble, but Engadget gets 4x the visitors that slashdot does, 2 million vs 500k, [compete.com] so really we're the third-rate website
Also slashdot stories are user submitted, so it only makes sense that their would be links to stories written by writers that (hopefully) do research.
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:3, Insightful)
You know a lot of people have turned the price of a Mac and their $99 Developer Program expenses into a shit ton of cash.
Sure, you could try the same trick on Android, but even though there are more Android phones sold now, Apple's App Store accounts for 92% of the cell phone application store bucks spent. App Store coders like me certainly won't miss the competition, anyway, so yeah, stick to your plan of not developing for the iOS. That's the best advice I can give you.
Re:Quantity != Quality (Score:1, Insightful)
You mean like the biggest wireless carriers do with every phone even if it's Android?
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:4, Insightful)
Ha (Score:5, Insightful)
"I'm not trying to put Android down, but... it can get greater marketshare and still be crappy."
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:5, Insightful)
You know a lot of people have turned the price of a Mac and their $99 Developer Program expenses into a shit ton of cash.
Far less than the number of people who have turned the price of a Windows license and a MSDN subscription into a shit ton of cash, I assure you. After all, corporations pay a lot better than hipsters.
Re:Slashdot is just driving traffic to worthless s (Score:5, Insightful)
from the comments, most engadget readers (and I'm one but I digress) are pro-sumers at best and often sound like high schoolers fighting over whose gadget is coolest. You don't seem to get any actual techs or engineers (at least those of us there are smart enough to keep our mouth shut since the SNR is so darned high) unlike here where you can (sometimes) get engaged in interesting discussions on the real technical specifics.
Re:Slashdot is just driving traffic to worthless s (Score:5, Insightful)
This is so true. A comment here has no credibility in and of itself but there WILL be serious physicists posting on a physics story here. The same with any other scientific, technical, or engineering article.
There is plenty of hyperbole posted. When I read a hyperbole headline a glance at the comments will usually reveal how and why the article/summary isn't what it seemed within 5-10 lines.
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:3, Insightful)
Dutch commenters on Engadget have equated the Dutch paper doing the quoting with the UK's The Sun or The National Enquirer in the US.
Then where are the titties [wikipedia.org]???
It would be more accurate to compare the telegraaf to Fox News: one ultra conservative 800 lb gorilla in a jungle of moderate or liberal silk monkeys.
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:2, Insightful)
I've yet to see anything even resembling a good analysis of app risk/reward. After not having good detailed numbers on the iPhone app market, another huge problem is that despite all the complaints, Apple lets in way too many worthless apps -- "me too" apps, especially, as well as apps that just don't do anything particularly useful. (I still see ads for jobs like "help us develop a crappy medical equipment ad as an iPhone app.") I don't care that some amateur developer spent too long figuring out how to make the fiftieth fart app and didn't make money off of it, and so far every story I've read about people not making much money has been along those lines. I am very curious about developers who make solid apps that have some sort of noticeable, worthwhile and unique quality to them, and how they end up doing.
Re:It's not about your apps on IOS (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm typing this on a tram from a netbook tethered to my Android phone. How good is your tethering app?
I am typing this directly on my iPhone, why do I need to carry another computer with me? Without carrying a PC, why should I care how good/bad is my tethering app?
I don't see any flash ads at all, why do I need another ad-block app? I have no intention of writing programs on my phone, why should I care why programming tools are there? I have an external battery to carry, and I have iPhone charger in my car, why would I want to mess with my phone's clock speed? You sounded just like the Linux fans of old who keep telling windows users how great it is that he can compile the kernel while doing other things! Yeah, but why do we need to keep recompiling the kernel?
This is the problem with you Android fans, you guys keep insisting that iPhone users are missing out this feature and that function, when in fact, this are what iPhone users have already looked and determined that we do not want or do not need them!
Is it so hard to understand that not everyone uses their phone like you do? Nor will we ever want to?
How about you guys learn to respect the choice other people made and stop evangelize your platform whenever iPhones are mentioned?
Re:Who cares about iOS or Android, really? (Score:3, Insightful)
I replied, so that perhaps your eyes (and your fellow country men & women) are opened, and you don't believe the propaganda,
I live in the place; am not a native; and am like many around me highly critical of both the Hong Kong and central government.
corruption *perception* not sure how it's measured, but I presume it's not the same as actual corruption rates,
Agreed. However Hong Kong is worldwide considered as a really clean city when it comes to corruption; largely thanks to the great work done by the ICAC.
How does Hong Kong rank for democratically elected government, how does it rank in freedom of speech, freedom of press?, civil liberty?
Press freedom, as I wrote already, is nr 34 in the world. Not great, but not bad at all too. And it's defended vigorously. I have yet to hear about someone put behind bars for saying something the government doesn't like. And I hear so often the government complaining about criticism by the press - not that they dare to do anything about it, it does indicate the press is doing their job.
And for democracy: half of legco is now democratically elected, that must improve. But with the freedom of protest people power works: serious discontent and the 2003 pro-democracy march is what toppled the then-CE Tung Che-Hwa. That was a major embarrassment for the central government but they had no choice. So maybe not direct elections, the people have a voice and it's listened to. Soap-box democracy you could call it.
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:3, Insightful)
Read your linked article again. It's ridiculous.
The development cost for most iPhone developers is $99. They aren't quitting their day jobs in order to slave over XCode all day - they are banging these apps out in their spare time.
As the AC said, the author of the linked article has an obvious agenda - to steer people away from iPhone app development, and then he proceeds to put together a bunch of tangled assertions which supposedly support his agenda.
Re:Apple vs. Android. (Score:3, Insightful)
And Apple will lose again...
If Apple is losing, please sign me up to be a loser like them...
Hint: "Winning" isn't necessarily measured by market share.
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:3, Insightful)
There are not very many words there (not much of a reader, are you?) and they do not say anything about a headache.
The article has 430 words, and it can be summarized in "we can't support all Android units.
Also, from the link:
With our latest update, we worked hard to bring Angry Birds to even more Android devices. Despite our efforts, we were unsuccessful in delivering optimal performance.
I don't know you, but with my basic knowledge of slang, I'd call a headache anything I worked hard to do and despite all my efforts I found myself unsuccessful at doing it.
They do whine about their game not running on older, slower devices. Guess what? You have precisely the same problem on iOS devices, where your app will behave differently on iPhone, iPhone 3GS, older iPod touch, newer iPod touch, and iPad.
You do realize that they list newer hardware in the article (like the TMobile G2) and that Angry Birds runs flawlessly smooth in first generation iPhones despite those units only having 412mhz chips? Same game. Slower hardware. Running smoother.
That is what comes with hardware fragmentation. Graphic chips, ram speed, all that changes on every unit, sometimes even units made by the same manufacturer. Chip changes specially are a huge deal, as not all handle OpenGl the same way, making it forceful to test your code on every single unit and somtimes optimize for each, regardless how new the hardware is. THAT is fragmentation, not in the OS but in the hardware.
Oh and yea, it happens in the PC world too. Big studios spend a lot of money in Q&A to test across many configurations and the most common variety off video cards. At the end of the day they tend to only support two of all the graphic chip brands out there, because it's just not viable to test for all. That seems to be the way of the Android, developers will have to test certain cellphones with certain chips and just tell their users they can only support those.
You are an Apple fanboy or shill. Go away.
You are an Android fanboy who cant read and accept the facts. I accept iPhones are closed and not everyone can develop completely freely for them, and the fact that they are locked up with the second worst carrier in the US. Why can't you accept Android's flaws too?
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:3, Insightful)
There are basically only three platforms: old iPhone / iPod Touch, retina iPhone / iPod Touch, iPad.
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:3, Insightful)
The complaints about the RIAA et al, are because the figures are reversed - for every dollar spent, the lion's share goes to them for "promotion, distribution, A&R and recouping investment" while a tiny slice goes to the artist. Apple's cut is the small share, and covers hosting, distribution and a small fee. Apple aren't making hay on the app store in software sales - the cost covers the expenditure, with a little left over. The RIAA, on the other hand, takes the bulk and says "be happy for it".
Apple's profit on software sales from the app store (and similarly, profit on music/movie sales) is clearly stated in their financial statements, and you cannot lie on those (well, you can, but they're not Enron or WorldCon), so we can be reasonably sure they're not lying when they say "the 30% cut covers running the store" - the profit margin is pretty low. The real reason they do it is to drive sales of iPods and iPhones - which makes up an *enormous* amount of their overall profit (dwarfing even sales of laptops and desktops). The pittance from the app store software sales themselves are just a drop in the bucket.
Could they offer hosting and distribution for free? Sure, and it wouldn't hurt them in the grand scheme of things all that much, but it's still not a negligible figure - the store consumes a huge amount of bandwidth, and it's certainly not free to keep all those servers running all the time. I imagine they have weighed the cost of charging a nominal amount for taking the hassle out of distributing a developer's app (no server hassle, no hosting bills, no need for billing, no need for any of that - you just get a check in the mail, minus 30%) with offering the same deal for free and decided that enough people will see the 30% as reasonable.
I know which I would prefer (hosting and distributing my app myself, and keeping whatever profit was left after expenses, versus having apple do it and lose 30% of the total to them, but not have any of the expense or hassle of doing it in house), but then, convenience is high on my list of desires.
The only missing part is the ability to choose to do it all in house if you want, but given that the cut is not *too* severe, and that if you were going to do it yourself you would still have to pay for hosting, bandwidth, staff, billing expenses, server costs etc, I'm not sure too many people worry about it. Apple has economies of scale on its side to keep those costs low by averaging them out. I guess if you were big enough and had enough apps you could get your costs under 30c per dollar of revenue for all those things, but for indie developers who really just want to focus on writing apps, having that headache taken away from them is more than worth it.