By John Gruber
Kolide ensures only secure devices can access your cloud apps. Watch the demo to see how it works.
Speaking of Instapaper and Android apps, developer Ryan Bateman has written a fascinating postmortem on Papermill, a well-designed Instapaper client for Android. He covers everything from the development to its financial results:
I think this unhappy end-scenario — of applications that either compromise on quality or have not had the necessary time invested in their design — is as a result of Android users not being willing to pay for an app whose focus is quality and whose price reflects this. Instead, these users opt for a free but less refined experience. This has led to a race to the bottom, with independent developers creating applications are de-facto free instead and relying on ads for profit. The quality of the design and user-experience are subsequently not a factor in their creation, as there is both no great impetus to provide it nor any expectation from the user that it will be forthcoming.
I must gently disagree with the following parenthetical, however:
While “cheaper smartphones” is an entirely valid core market to target (and one that is actually Android’s strength — while device manufacturers will always be creating mid-range Android handsets and can edge into the high-end market, Apple is highly unlikely to create anything but a high-end smartphone), the resulting user expectations, and subsequent race to-the-bottom app development, is reflected in the current general quality of Android apps.
Apple may never release a new non-high-end phone, but they do have mid-range and low-end smartphone models: the iPhone 4 and 3GS. The brilliance of Apple’s move-last-year’s-model-one-slot-down-the-totem-pole pattern is that even their low-end model is a former high-end model, just two years removed. Apple gets to hit lower retail price points while avoiding additional fragmentation for developers. And a consumer who buys a new free-with-contract iPhone 3GS today gets a phone that is of significantly higher build quality than the free-with-contract Android phones I’ve seen.
★ Tuesday, 3 April 2012