“Users no longer need to be locked into one platform. Being able to write an app once and run it anywhere has been a long-sought-after goal and a very hard problem to solve.”
This is naive, stupid, or both. There never was a technical cause of lock in (as indeed the Apportable people are not alone in demonstrating), it's purely an artificial business construct with the surmountable technical hurdles being very convenient.
It's well within Apple's capabilities to launch the media consumption parts of iTunes on Android, like on Windows PCs, but it should be kind of telling that they don't.
One of the lessons of my career so far is never underestimate the ability of people to assume that problems are primarily technical in nature when actually the real problem is something else. Technical excuses can often be used for after the fact justification of management decisions.
I actually know the engineer who used to be responsible for porting some of the technologies you're talking about to non-Apple platforms.
According to this person, the barrier is not some strategic lock-in plan at Apple. The barrier is more about business incompatibilities.
For example. It's fully possible for Apple to ship an iCloud SDK for Windows. But the way iCloud works is, it's integrated deeply with each application. It is believable that your average iOS app, or your average Mac app, would be willing to integrate with iCloud's SDK. But is it believable that your average Windows app will? Will Microsoft do the work to integrate the iCloud SDK with Office on Windows? Of course not! The idea is preposterous.
Far more likely is that Microsoft's own SkyDrive or will become standard on Windows, or maybe Dropbox will, which is designed in such a way that it doesn't have to integrate with anybody's product. Apple could have designed iCloud in a way that didn't require third-party support, and maybe they should've, but they didn't. And anyway that would be a completely different thing than the way iCloud is used right now.
Apple has the willingness, particularly post-Jobs, to license some things to other platforms. Especially if it grows their own ecosystem, and a lot of Apple's stack falls into that category. But getting the deal done has more ingredients than just Apple being willing and some end-user who wants it. You can't say, merely because there is no technical barrier, that clearly every time an Android user buys a book from Kindle instead of the iBookstore that Tim Cook cackles with glee. I pretty much guarantee he'd be interested in getting a deal done on that.
I actually thought it odd that they would cite iTunes as a feature that Android users would want.
iTunes on Windows is one of the worst pieces of software by a major company...ever. If I want to buy music or video I can do it through Amazon, and I have vastly more trust for Amazon's pricing structures. (Remember the anti-trust suit that Apple lost? The one that found them guilty of artificially keeping eBook prices high? And now we have Amazon fighting with another publisher to get them to agree to lower eBook prices...)
My experience with iTunes on Windows when I had an iPod Touch 2G was the main reason I initially purchased an Android phone when I first got a smartphone.
Yes, you should definitely trust the pricing of the company that started out the ebook business selling best-sellers for less than they had to pay in royalties to publishers. I mean, it couldn't possibly have been an attempt to drive competitors out of the space...
What I remember is that Amazon created the e-book space, for all intents and purposes.
And the reason they undercut the royalty price was to create that market. People didn't want to spend $20 or more to buy an electronic copy of a book they could buy for less in physical form. People aren't stupid: If they aren't getting a physical item they can then hand to their friends and/or sell, then what they're getting has less value.
Heck, I still get annoyed by crazy-high eBook prices. An eBook should absolutely ALWAYS cost less than the physical copy. If there are 500 copies available used for $0.01 on Amazon, then it shouldn't be more than about $5 (paying a bit for the convenience of having a digital copy -- those $0.01 copies typically add ~$4 in shipping costs), and yet you can find $8-10 price on a Kindle edition. [1]
Amazon has a very strong customer focus. [2] That results in lower prices. It also makes it harder for competition, yes, but that "customer obsession" has become core to the culture at Amazon.
> One of the lessons of my career so far is never underestimate the ability of people to assume that problems are primarily technical in nature when actually the real problem is something else.
Amen. When I'm feeling trollish around my tech friends, I'll insist that mobile, not fiber, is the future of the internet, or that mailing DVDs is better than streaming. The former because the OTA market allows new entrants, easier competition. The latter because licensing costs are a red queen problem, and make building a full catalog impossible.
Those are mostly argument starters, but really each just based on getting people to admit one idea: technology isn't the final arbiter of efficiency/inefficiency. Legal and economic considerations are sometimes the trump suit.
Having dealt with many of the dozens of hybrid platforms, I can assure you that most are slow, poorly integrated, and end up with hard-to-solve UX bugs in any complex application. This is because most of them are based upon producing Javascript and HTML5 with only a few native features.
I know that Apple doesn't want Android versions of their own applications, but there is no excuse why we have to have a discussion about Android first or Apple first for startups if the hybrid solutions were actually sufficient. In practice, there is always a tradeoff.
Also, Apple likes to write SDK features which break their security model that only they may use in their own apps.
This may be true - but in the so called 'AAA' video games industry at least, it's become increasingly common to provide OS X ports of Windows games by simply packaging them up with a wrapper coincidentally called Cider - https://www.transgaming.com/cider
Edit: Seems like the Android<->iOS Cider team have realised this and renamed to 'Cycada'
This is naive, stupid, or both. There never was a technical cause of lock in (as indeed the Apportable people are not alone in demonstrating), it's purely an artificial business construct with the surmountable technical hurdles being very convenient.
It's well within Apple's capabilities to launch the media consumption parts of iTunes on Android, like on Windows PCs, but it should be kind of telling that they don't.
One of the lessons of my career so far is never underestimate the ability of people to assume that problems are primarily technical in nature when actually the real problem is something else. Technical excuses can often be used for after the fact justification of management decisions.