

One month later, Honeycomb has just 50 native apps - redacted
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/03/one-month-later-honeycomb-has-just-50-native-apps.ars

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jrockway
Well, there's only one device, and no real person can afford it or would buy
it with all the bugs. Motorola is hit or miss. The Xoom is a miss. The only
people I've seen with a Xoom either work for Motorola or work for a tech
review site. Otherwise, they simply don't exist. There's no market yet.

In June, when the real hardware manufacturers start cranking these things out,
I think we'll see an increase in apps. I'm looking forward to what Asus and
Samsung bring to the table.

But to be honest, I'm sick of "apps" -- just make your little toy a website,
please. Then I can use it on any device without any effort on your part.
(Yeah, then there's no "app store", but who cares? All the app store is is
someone that takes 30% of your money and lets idiotic users post comments like
"Not enough space on my device for this! Negative eighty stars!" all over your
app's page. Why would you want that?)

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bignoggins
App Store provides easy monetization and discoverability. If you want to make
money off of a side project, I'd argue a native app is a far easier route to
take than a web app.

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jrockway
How much money are side projects actually making people? (Taxes are a big
issue. Is your app really worth enough to have to deal with a 1040 + 1099s
instead of the 1040EZ?)

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bignoggins
I've made ~110K in my first 9 months on the app store. Apple takes care of
scalability, monetization, discovery, etc. Native mobile apps are just so much
easier to make money off of, which is why they are taking off.

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jrockway
Before or after income taxes?

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bignoggins
before

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ZeroGravitas
The iOS developer they quote extensively seems somewhat confused:

 _"And even if developers wanted to create such a “true tablet experience,”
they’re hard-pressed to do it without the source code for Honeycomb, which
Google is currently keeping a tight reign over. The big device manufacturers
working on Honeycomb-powered hardware—like HTC, Motorola and Samsung—all have
early access to the code, but only after licensing agreements were made with
Google. Smaller developers don’t have this luxury."_

Why would he think the source to Honeycomb is required to make an app scale to
different screen sizes and resolutions?

I'm also wondering what the definition of "native" is in the headline.

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allwein
>I'm also wondering what the definition of "native" is the headline.

Because Honeycomb tablets will happily run older Android 2.x apps in a scaled
up compatibility mode. The "Native" refers to apps specifically written just
for Honeycomb or those existing apps which also specifically support
Honeycomb.

The comparison in iOS was the way that iPad pixel-doubled existing iPhone
apps, the iPad specific apps developed just for iPad, and Universal apps which
were developed for both iPhone and iPad.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
From his blog:

 _"My criteria for considering an app for this list is that it either requires
Android 3.0 or have its user interface be specifically designed for a tablet
experience. I didn’t count games or existing Android apps that are just
upconverted to take advantage of the existing screen real estate. While it is
a marginally better experience than trying to run an iPhone app on an iPad,
I’m not counting it given that Apple doesn’t count the hundreds of thousands
of iPhone exclusive apps in its 65,000 iPad app count."_

So "native" seems to refer to having a redesigned UI, and if your UI naturally
scales (displaying or taking pictures, showing video, 3D or vector based
games, webpages, maps etc.) then that's not "native" by this definition.

Seems like a "no pain no gain" approach, if your app just works on multiple
resolutions than that counts as a demerit for the OS, rather than as a good
thing.

There also seems to be widespread ignorance about the pre-Xoom and pre-
Honeycomb tablets that are out there. They're only for hobbyists since they
don't ship with the Google Market, but people have been using them, and
debugging their apps on them for many months.

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zacharypinter
There's a few background issues here to acknowledge:

* The honeycomb emulator is pretty much unusable for development. It's beyond slow, meaning that any sort of practical development is going to need a physical device. Compare this to the iPad emulator, which is snappy and very usable for development without needing an actual iPad.

* The xoom has been out for a month, but it wasn't until last Sunday that you could buy a wifi-only version and avoid paying the Verizon tax. Several people (myself included) eagerly bought xooms on Sunday in order to start developing.

* The app situation is grim, but it isn't as grim as the article leads you to believe. Android apps are already built with resizable layouts due to the device fragmentation everybody talks about. As such, most phone apps scale reasonably well even if they haven't been updated for tablets. This is a far better situation than the 2x scaling of iPhone apps on the iPad.

So, while there are reasons that honeycomb development has been stalled up
until this point, those reasons are quickly disappearing, making it a great
time to start developing.

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junklight
Perhaps the intersection of people who think "it's just a big phone and I
really want a laptop" and people who develop for android is quite high.

Still - given Honeycomb is being touted as the "ipad killer", and ignoring the
silliness of that concept, it is surprising that developers aren't seeing the
xoom as a good way of getting ready for the flood of honeycomb devices that is
apparently coming. It's hard to work out from the various trolling headlines
about how iOs or Android has "won" something or other - but doesn't Android
have quite a healthy developer base? are they making money?

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raganwald
_Perhaps the intersection of people who think "it's just a big phone and I
really want a laptop" and people who develop for android is quite high._

I don't know if that's true, but it's still a really intriguing question,
thank you! The follow-up also seems relevant: What is the intersection between
people who think "it's just a big phone and I really want a laptop" and people
who _buy_ android?

If the market for android tablets is also the market for netbooks, that could
be a problem. Apple is going out of their way to distance the iPad from
netbooks and sell to people who don't want a laptop--or already have one and
are buying this as a third device after their phone and laptop.

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trotsky
I think a big part of the difference between launch/early apps is the state of
the emulators. Apple's emulator runs quite fast due to using a lot of native
desktop code, and is in many ways suitable for testing at least a 1.0 version
[1]. Android's emulator is a full virtualized stack and runs significantly
slower than the target platform, making it hard to get a real idea of how well
your program is running.

Hence, while you could be pretty confident releasing a day one iPad app, many
android devs would balk at the same situation with Honeycomb. A lot of devs
may be waiting for a different tablet than the Xoom as well, while Apple devs
obviously could all buy theirs on day one.

The Xoom and 3.0.0 honeycomb both feel a bit rushed, there is probably a good
argument for calling it a preview out here in reality. I don't think that's an
indictment of the platform over all, though.

[1] Not an active iOS dev, but that's how I remember it.

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joelackner
i was lucky enough to get my honeycomb app featured (DrawFree) and have been
considered on the the few honeycomb specific apps -- i don't believe this is
true. the market just doesn't offer a way to find honeycomb optimized apps.

also, android's method of scaling apps is far more usable than the way the
ipad does it. visual quality doesn't suffer (mostly), just some minor
usability issues with things being far too small.

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ZeroGravitas
One of the comments claims that iPhone apps with art assets designed
specifically for the iPhone 4 don't use them, but instead pixel double the
smaller art assets for use on the iPad. Is that true?

He seems to think this is a good thing, but it means the comparison of Android
scaling and iPad scaling is even less true, as on the iPad it is intentionally
made to look worse than it could.

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cube13
The comment states that the iPad is upscaling the iPhone 3GS graphics on the
iPad, rather than just using the higher resolution iPhone 4 retina graphics at
near full resolution.

I'm 90% sure that this is the case. I think that the main reason why Apple did
this is because the iPhone 4 has 512 MB RAM, and the iPad 1 only has 256
MB(iPad 2 has 512). That could make performance with the higher resolution
graphics an issue for the iPad.

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illumin8
I can verify this is the case. I have Final Fantasy III on iPad, which is a
native Retina display app for iPhone 4, and it only displays with iPhone 3GS
graphics in pixel doubled mode.

This is unfortunate, and I think you're right. The iPhone 4 does have better
graphics hardware than the iPad 1. It would be interesting to see if iPad 2
could overcome this limitation. Judging by the video I saw of an iPad 2
outputing 1080P to HDMI at 60 frames per second running Real Racing 2 HD, I
would say that the iPad 2 has the graphics hardware to handle actually scaling
a native iPhone 4 retina display app to it's own resolution.

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orky56
I think it's funny that the article mentions that there needs to be more
hardware with Honeycomb to have more apps. Sorry but if hw like the iPad is
built well enough and with enough hw options, then that's enough of a reason
to build apps for it, in advance of any sales.

Google is always playing the catchup game, being slow and patient and then
storming the market with new devices whenever they feel ready.

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afsina
I think a good web based design can make a lot of "native" application
irrelevant. That, probably is what google wants anyway.

