Tuesday 20 March 2012

Devs Losing Interest In Android    [ 20-03-2012 14:19 ]

Author: Irina Turina   Source: The Register     Translation by: Paul Smith     

A new study from IDC and Appcelerator reveals that developer interest in Android has been on the wane over the past year. The study involved 2,173 developers registered on Appcelerators development platform (out of a total of 280,000). A year ago the numbe rof developers saying that they were very interested in developing for Android for smartphones stood at 86%. That now stands at 78%. Those saying the same for Android for tablets was at 75% a year ago; currently that figure is at 67%.

These may not seem like monumental changes in interest, however, last year the number of developers expressing serious interest in developing for Android for smartphones just 3% behind those saying the same thing was iOS for iPhone and 2% behind iOS for iPad. iOS level of developer interest has remained pretty much consistent over the year, but Android's has dropped. Mik King, Appcelerator principal mobile strategist, summed it up:

This slow erosion of Android is interesting because if you go back to the beginning of last year, Android was not quite neck-and-neck [with iOS], but pretty darn close.

So what's the cause of this decline? Well for King the reason is pretty simple: fragmentation.  He has a point with that given that iOS has relatively few devices and most users will be using the latest version of the platform, and if not then the number of major versions in widespread usage will be relatively small. Compare that with Android, which has a large number of different devices with different hardware and configurations alongside multiple different platform versions all seeing major usage.

Android is definitely outselling iOS, but developers will definitely have an easier time of it with iOS. How that plays out for Android in the long term remains to be seen, but these early indicators aren't encouraging for Android or indeed its users. Not that a bit of slippage in developer interest spells the death knell for Android, but it could mean that we see fewer app ports or indeed just some apps that don't make it to Android at all.

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Nokia To Build Revolutionary New Phone To Beat iPhone's 'Poor Design'    [ 20-03-2012 13:17 ]

Author: Irina Turina   Source: BGR     Translation by: Paul Smith     

It seems that Nokia has a bit of a skunkworks in operation with the aim of producing a revolutionary new phone that will blow the competition clean out of the water. That's pretty much the take away from a recent interview Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia's chief of design, gave to Finnish newspaper Kauppalehti. Ahtisaari seems to believe that Apple's much praised iOS interface is convoluted and is in fact 'poorly designed'. Those aren't often adjectives one hears when talking about iOS it has to be said.

Ahtisaari summed up his view of iOS "The road from the kitchen into the dining room is always through the front door". In other words he is saying that iOS relies too heavily upon its centralised control from Apple. Symbian and Android, by comparison, were described as being 'dollhouses' by Ahtisaari, with users able to pick and arrange the furniture. That leaves Microsoft's Windows Phone platform, which Nokia uses for its smartphones. Unsurprisingly Ahtisaari considers Windows Phone to be the most natural feeling of these platforms and the new handset Nokia is working on will allegedly stretch Windows Phone beyond what we see at the moment.

Obviously Ahtisaari wasn't providing any concrete details of this new superphone, but he was setting the bar pretty high nevertheless. He mentioned 'breakthrough' technology and how Nokia would revolutionize the user experience. Users will apparently not have to actually touch the handset in order to use it. That brings up thoughts of a voice controlled handset, which would be in keeping with the current trend of services like Siri and Google's forthcoming Assistant. Nokia might be looking to really push the envelope on this though if the entire handset and all of its functionality can be controlled just through voice. Perhaps it might even be something more exotic though like a HUD or gesture based input modelled on Microsoft's Kinect.

Ahtisaari's comments were later clarified by Nokia, according to BGR, and we are told that what he was referencing were concepts. That's as may be, but the question is how far Nokia are willing to take these concepts in this new device. If it really is going to produce a whole new way of interacting with a device then maybe the concepts themselves will have to be stretched.

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