Adoption Rates, or Why iOS Over Android

When my iPhone 3G got insanely bogged down by poorly-optimized code in iOS 4 I got frustrated with Apple and decided to look into an Android phone. The results were horrendous, and I ended up getting the 4S to maintain my sanity. My temptation to go into the world of Android was dashed by Android and the mobile-makers that use it.

When I get an iPhone I know it’ll just work and I don’t need to pay attention to annoying numbers that only somebody who spends too much time with computers would know. I know what these numbers mean and I understand them, I just don’t want to deal with it – it’s a personal preference to not have to think about mHZ or cycles anymore. Android’s version naming after pastries* doesn’t help make anything clearer either. I’d rather think about what cool apps I can get instead.

Essentially I got turned off of Android because all of a sudden I went from thinking ‘phone’ to thinking ‘complex technology’ and had to pay attention to not only phone manufactures but what version of firmware that phone had on a carrier. No thanks. I know that people will think that I was lazy in my search and you know what I was.

If I saw a solution that clearly provided the most recent Android version and was a good build I would’ve got it. Instead every time I got close another ad, article, blog, would raise doubts and I suffered choice paralysis as a result.

That’s just my experience though, and a rant at that.

The reason I’m even writing this is that a recent investigation into adoption rates of new software makes Android look, well, not too good.

Essentially Apple has it’s users upgrade quickly and Android users take longer. This results in a clear OS version to build on for Apple whereas on Android you’d have to develop for multiple platforms.

This graph sums things up well:

Fortunately for us, the folks at The Next Web can summarize the findings with far less ranting than me. Their dissection of the above information can be found in their article about why developers love iOS.

They got a choice quote from a developer on why the developer dropped support for iOS 4 on the iPad.

Tapbots recently launched a new version of its popular Twitter app Tweetbot for the iPad. This was offered as a separate app from the iPhone version, allowing developer Paul Haddad to choose which
OS he would make the minimum requirement. Tweetbot for iPad launched with iOS 5 — the latest major version — required.

“iOS 5.0 works on all the iPads, there’s not much of a reason to support older iOS versions,” sayd Haddad. “There’s a few people who are still running iOS 4.3 on iPad but that number is minuscule compared to the folks who have upgraded. It makes very little sense to spend the development effort support 4.x on iPads.”

The gamble paid off too, with the app reaching #1 on Apple’s top iPad Apps chart and Haddad says that “we’ve gotten two people complaining about it, so it was a pretty big win.”

*I know it’s in alphabetical order, but that’s not very intuitive when they are listed in a seemingly random order throughout the net.



March 7th, 2012 by Adam

Rick Mercer on Insane, Intrusive Law Proposed by Conservatives

It seems that doing business online is getting harder with every passing month in this country. This is not good. I’m sure most Canadians have heard of this, but I’d thought I’d bring it up again for good measure.

Here’s Rick Mercer on the absurdity of a law proposed under Vic Towes, who also alleges we support child pronographers. ಠ_ಠ

If you do anything on the internet and live in Canada you should be concerned about this Bill C-30.



February 23rd, 2012 by Adam

Tax Breaks: A Misunderstanding

Jesse Brown has published an article that has enraged the entire Canadian games industry – and rightly so! Brown wrote a piece called Grand theft tax break that is based off of a New York Times article on tax breaks in the USA for the video game industry there.

Brown’s piece ignores a lot of the great stuff that has come out of the video game industry here in Canada. Torontoist has a really good rebuttal to Brown that among other things points out how Toronto had an indie scene before Ubisoft came to town:

In Toronto, tax incentives make sense; our local industry is fledgling relative to those in Vancouver and Montreal. In fact, Ontario has smartly focused on supporting the industry here with tax breaks and grants and has tangible results to show for it: Toronto is now a rising star in the games world. However, what convinced Ontario to invest? It’d be hard to argue that the success of Vancouver and Montreal wasn’t a major factor. So, while Brown would like a Canadian industry of our “own,” the presence of one was undoubtedly catalyzed by the draw of foreign corporations, which brought along their knowledgebase and visibility.

Brown also called game developers slobs (essentially) which is just insulting and has no merit. Village Gamer has a good response to that:

These people – to whom Mr. Brown referred to as “code monkeys” and “grunts” are my friends, and it is these “grunts” who help to bring entire worlds to life, whether it is in an adventure – and sneakily educational – game like Assassin’s Creed, or an educational game that is sneakily fun like those coming out of Vivity Labs’ Fit Brains – all of them are built on top of a foundation built from computer code. Even the military relies on “grunts” to get things done, and done well, Mr. Brown.

What’s more is that Brown assumes that people who are working in the games industry now will inevitably lose their jobs when tax breaks get better elsewhere. I don’t think that’s true. In manufacturing, jobs do go elsewhere (look at NAFTA), but when it comes to the culture industry we can also create more culture no matter how many companies are here (unlike cars).

A lot of the companies that have produced best-selling games here have gotten a helping hand from the government but they have also helped the industry throughout Canada by bringing and attracting talent. People who wanted to get into game production use to leave the country but now, thanks to the tax incentives companies are coming here to access that talent.

If the big companies leave we’ll still have talent that can produce top-quality content because they’ll have the know-how and the connections to it.

The game industry is helping to retain (and attract) culture-producing people to Canada and that’s good for everyone.



September 15th, 2011 by Adam
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