Apple announces new graphics API: Metal

General Discussions
#81

The cost of entry for Apple is way higher than Android, but this is beside the point. I see this argument is wrapped around one post. Pirates vs. a secure marketplace.

Honestly, both markets have their faults. I can’t disagree. Android is plagued by lots and lots of games and pirates cluttering the market. Apple has barred a lot from getting in so less games and applications enter the marketplace. This problem still lacks an elegant solution. Developers are being shafted, users are being hoarded, and the major players like Google, Apple, and Amazon still make money. This environment is just bad for developers and users, and honestly that is the core of my discomfort with this.

Developers are being treated like middlemen, but for exposure, we bear with the decisions made. In a perfect development cycle, stability of technology is the most important thing. However, the major shifts by these companies pull us into these loyalty wars. In its core, it is developers crying out “What about us?” We just want a stable solution to reach a widespread audience. In that regard, I think Android is the lesser of two evils.

But hey, regardless of what we say… I suppose we just have to “deal with it,” right?

#82

Developers are being “shafted”? The App Store created a brand new cottage industry overnight. No one’s going to argue that Apple’s engaging in altruism here, but there’s a huge difference between a mobile app ecosystem not existing, and not generating lots of jobs for developers, and what we’ve got in the App Store as it is.

I think what a lot of this boils down to is simply harping on “openness” for its own sake. There is nothing innately good about platforms, programming languages, and so on, being “open.” This is one thing I really wish people in the programming/dev community would stop harping on so much. You may think there’s a “loyalty war” going on here, but that’s a personal, individual choice that I see tons of programmers make for themselves every single day. Oracle, Apple, the dude who created Ruby, or whomever … none of these entities are telling you to engage in ideological warfare with other “camps.” And yet I see so much of it, driven completely by the programmers themselves.

The bottom line is that it’s not Apple’s fault that Android app consumers spend significantly less dough on apps. It’s not Apple’s fault that piracy (largely because of the “openness” of the platform) is rampant on Android. Should it be any big surprise that iOS app releases are typically prioritized over Android versions? You stand a far better chance of getting a return on your development dollar in the App Store ecosystem. If things pan out, then you port to Android. Again, not Apple’s fault. People don’t do this just because they happened to have a few iMacs lying around and think, “Huh, maybe I should just do this in iOS … oh crap! I’m locked in now!” It’s such a silly analysis that I don’t really know what else to say about it.

#83

But sadly dickhead like RS of FSF do. People buy into their BS which encourages irrational behavior even in adult programmers.

Don’t forget the raw numbers of market share.

#84

Honestly, I think the Mac/iOS programming community may be the most drama-/ideology-free of the bunch. Ruby programmers, by comparison, are some of the worst. They constantly jaw about what a positive, almost therapeutic, experience it is to use their elegant, magical, spiritual programming language, but really spend most of their time spewing bile about Java. I dig Ruby, but get tired of that whole aspect of the culture really quickly. :smiley:

#85

Java’s just made getting stuff to run on MacOS a smidgen easier than having to do it in C++. All my code however is based on top of LWJGL, which in turn, is a thin veneer over OpenGL. The same goes for most libgdx projects. It’s worth keeping an eye on.

Mac revs for us are approx 6.5% of our totals… it won’t hurt to lose it, much.

Cas :slight_smile:

#86

Actually… in the circles I move in, that’s no longer the case. Android is thoroughly beating iOS for revenues, as it inevitably always would. 4-5 years ago it was something like 100:10:1 for iOS:Android:WP7 amongst mostly everyone I knew… now it’s 10:100:1. I wonder if Apple’s new “rules” and “improvements” to the App Store might help reverse some of this trend.

Cas :slight_smile:

#87

Well, in your circles it may not be the case, but it is very much the general reality. iOS accounts for something like 70% of download revenue. iPhone users download fewer apps, but spend far more on them. Android users expect everything for free or extremely cheap, and they generally get it, to the detriment of developers.

#88

While that may be true, it’s a very broad statement that probably doesn’t tell the whole story.
Android’s target demographic is a lot wider than Apple’s, so naturally the market is different in general.

But can we really say that app revenue is all that different if we focus on games and top-end phones for example? And do these stats include things like add revenue (still an important source of revenue)? Many Android devices don’t even ship with Google Play; is content revenue from those devices counted in these stats?

It’s difficult to directly compare Apple with Android when it comes to app revenue, so I have to say that I’m more interested in real life experiences there than general statistics.

#89

Well, the entire point of even bringing up this comparison is to answer the question, why are so many developers prioritizing iOS releases over Android releases? I don’t think it can possibly be because these people are “locked in” to Apple’s proprietary ecosystem, as others have suggested. Given that most, if not all, of the financial comparisons I’ve seen between iOS and Android seem to heavily favor iOS as the more profitable platform, I’ve got to believe that this has something to do with it. Even if, by some strange magic, this differential happened to be untrue or inaccurate, developers at least seem to have the impression that they will make more money on iOS. Why would that be? Is Apple throwing money at the companies who run this analysis?

All I know is that, as long as Android development is possible on Macs (and it, indeed, very much is), Mac-based developers will never have to choose between iOS and Android. The platform problem would only explain why Windows-based developers are, perhaps, locked out of iOS development. It doesn’t explain the opposite situation.

#90

The reason why developers have historically prioritised iOS are: a) it came out first and created the market b) a lot of people made a lot of money at it… in the goldrush years. A goldrush is an appropriate description of the iOS market. and c) iOS is somewhat easier to code for, there being far, far fewer devices to support.

The Android market - just the reasonable phones which use Google Play - now dwarfs the iOS market, and the customers aren’t the cheapasses they once were. The little birds tell me that iOS started to fall behind at about iOS 5 and I’m quite prepared to believe their figures. In fact just a few months ago we totally stopped targeting iOS for one of our game ports to concentrate on the Android version because it’ll literally make about ten times the money.

Cas :slight_smile:

#91

Okay. If we take what you’re saying as a given (even though the available data doesn’t support it) why should anybody care about the proprietary nature of iOS? Clearly it’s not a platform that anybody’s going to want to develop for in a few years time anyway, right?

#92

Well, indeed. Apple are trying to cling on to developers and making it a little more difficult to put code onto competing platforms to stem the tide but ultimately it’s going to go the same way the desktop wars went in the early 90s.

Cas :slight_smile:

#93

Cas: Why did apple release and open-source all of their LLVM backend for ARM? That helps all ARM devices include some android (don’t know the numbers here).

#94

LLVM looks to me to be a very niche pursuit on Android.

Cas :slight_smile:

#95

This is such a laughable argument. How is Apple “locking” anybody to their platform? It seems to me that, on a Mac, you can develop quite readily for both Android and iOS. It’s not as though people with Macs are like “Ugh, the only thing I can do is iOS apps, so I guess that’s what I’ll do.” Both options are more than viable on Mac.

I hate that I even have to say this, because I like Java just fine, but it seems to me that what this boils down to is Java adherents and Android fanboys refusing to deal with shortcomings of their platform. Notwithstanding your POV, which flies in the face of pretty much all the available data, odds are that you’ll make more money targeting iOS first. Also, you don’t have to deal with all the different hardware specifications, and you know that something like 80% of users will have the latest OS fairly shortly after it comes out (whereas Android is fragmented like nobody’s business).

Moreover, it’s not as though Apple is marching around trying to pressure third-party handset manufacturers to jump on the iOS bandwagon. They’re perfectly fine designing their own phones, using their own OS, and not really trying to propagate the platform beyond that. What is it that people find so wrong about this strategy? I could see if Apple was trying to put iOS anywhere and everywhere, because then developers really would have no choice but to develop only on Macs. But that’s absolutely not what Apple is, or ever has been, trying to do. They’ve got their own thing going. It’s a fairly successful thing, so far. But it’s not impinging on anybody else’s things.

I wish people would stop resting on the easy truisms about big, bad, evil Apple, and start taking a long, hard look at the problems with their chosen platform.

#96

I think you maybe mistake my motives. I think Apple are a great company and I think what they’re doing is right for them. Lock-in is subtle; it’s just adding friction and inertia to developers who are already exclusively on iOS and thinking of abandoning it to move to the larger, and yes, more lucrative Android market (depending on what sort of software you’re making and the kind of odds you mind taking a punt on).

Personally I’m still annoyed with Android being a bit shit, and still not actually having a useful JVM in it, but there we go.

Cas :slight_smile:

#97

My finger are typing words (git it?) because I can’t post this since otherwise my text contain’s too many quotes. Yadda yadda yadda…ho hum. Enough yet? Yeap!

#98

Tip: Whitespace counts towards post/quote ratio
Although I guess it’s less amusing.

#99

Yeah, still niche then (not default). And of course rather a lot of ordinary Android devs are entirely happy with Dalvik.

Cas :slight_smile:

#100

The problem is that you’re not really adequately explaining how this “lock-in” works. I’ll say it again: I can readily develop for both iOS and Android on a Mac. Exactly how does this constitute lock-in? Where is the subtlety here? Seems pretty clear to me.