More From the BBC on Supporting Android

Rory Cellan-Jones, writing for the BBC:

Why, when Android devices now have a much bigger share of the smartphone market than Apple, does the iPhone get BBC apps first? Why does the iPlayer run more smoothly on the iPhone and iPad, and when will Android users get the same ability to download as well as stream programmes? These and other questions fill my inbox and my Twitterstream.

But as I said, this is not my job, so I asked Daniel Danker, the BBC’s head of iPlayer, apps and all that stuff, to explain. […]

“If you look at the amount of energy we spend on Apple, it pales in comparison to what we spend on Android. […]

“People write to us saying just that, why bother supporting older devices, why don’t you just start with - and then they insert whichever model of phone they have. But more than a quarter of our requests to iPlayer come from devices running Gingerbread. And the number one device contacting us is still the Samsung Galaxy S2, which can’t handle advanced video.”

He seems optimistic that 2013 will be a turning point for Android.

★ Tuesday, 8 January 2013