Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how I can responsibly spend effort on developing an iPad app. The "approval" process is chaotic and arbitrary - witness intelligent cooperative people having their whole business shot down seemingly at random. I will develop for other platforms - the market leader Android for instance - which operate on the oldfashioned principle of "free market".

View on HN

Technically, Symbian is still the market leader by a comfortable margin.

(The development options are fairly confusing though. For C/C++ development, the only Symbian dev avenue worth considering nowadays is "Nokia Qt SDK", which is surprisingly nice. Java seems to be essentially deprecated, but higher-level options like Python and JavaScript through Web Runtime are available.)

Buying Qt was a brilliant move by Nokia. Qt fans like myself have naturally drifted toward Nokia phone development.

Google should support this guy: http://groups.google.com/group/android-ndk/browse_thread/thr... and be more open with development options in general. Official support for Mono or Qt would attract a lot of interest.

The preferred development avenues for Nokia smartphones (Symbian & Maemo/Meego) is either the Qt SDK [http://www.forum.nokia.com/Tools_Docs_and_Code/Tools/IDEs/No...] or WRT (Web RunTime) [http://www.forum.nokia.com/Technology_Topics/Web_Technologie...].

I agree that Qt is "surprisingly nice". Personally, I enjoy the iPhone UIKit framework, but the Qt SDK is almost as good (and in some areas better). I don't have much experience with the WRT, but in the N8 the demos I have seen are quite impressive performance-wise.

[disclaimer: I work for Nokia, take all I say (on this matter) with a grain of salt.]

Edit: Minor spelling.

Another way to look at it, though, is that they're avoiding optimization by proxy, by allowing human discretion in all their decisions. http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/is_google_paperclipping_the_web_...

Humans are fallible, and so you'll get false positives (and negatives) for what, in retrospect, seem like very bad reasons. However, the one thing you won't get are superstimuli—apps that the approval "algorithm" loves but people hate—because there are people inside the algorithm.

The market research puts Android in fourth place, after Nokia, RIM and Apple.

Even so, I can't even sell on Android market because I don't live in one of the approved countries.

If the market is the US, and we consider just current sales, then Android beat Apple this month.

So? You can just sell your app on your webpage. The market is not that compelling; it's hard to search and it's hard to read real reviews on your phone, so most people that actually need some software are just going to Google for what they need. The market mostly benefits developers of paid fart apps.

I usually search the web for Android apps anyways. It's just faster than hunting through a store.

Exactly. Apple's App Store is great for impulse buys, control, and marketing. But as a user, none of that is good for you.

The fact that I don't have to worry myself with payment processing makes it worthwhile.

Even before appstores, the most popular way to get software for a PDA/Smarthphone was with dedicated store sites, with the important difference that they bled you dry for cash.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com