Comment Re:Jobs is babbling. (Score 1) 864
Jobs also criticized the Android Marketplace, pointing out that there are at least three other app stores being launched by vendors, causing confusion for users and work for developers. "This is gonna be a mess for both users and developers,"
Yes, because people have proven that having more than one drug store, supermarket, or fast food chain inevitably disorients them and fouls up their lives. Oh, wait.
Your analogy is not completely isomorphic. If a food or drug manufacturer makes a product, they can directly sell it to any drug store, supermarket or fast food chain. Because the process of eating is the same for all people. You put food in one end, some hours later poop comes out the other end, the details are hidden by the black box of the digestive system.
Computer software is different. Unless there is a 100% agreed upon and followed standard in a hardware/software ecosystem, then different versions of the software will have to exist to account for the various hardware/software configurations. Apple's phone ecosystem is a completely closed and controlled system. A developer has to decide which is the minimum hardware configuration he wants to support (the 1, 2, 3, 3gs or whatever, or the 4) and code from there, knowing it will work on ALL phones that use that version of the OS or higher. Or they can code a reduced feature/functionality/blingbling branch to hit the early version(s) of IOS that don't support all the stuff they want. That is the extent of it.
The situation with Android is a little different. There are many different hardware configurations to support, and many different modifications or branches or forks or implemented features or extensions of the base OS. Having multiple stores will be good for a consumer. I can go to APP store X which I know verifies that all apps work with my version of Android (hopefully). As a developer I know have to ensure that my app meets the quality/interoperability standards of APP store X. But...... I have to QA again and possibly change code to meet the requirements of APP store Y. And again for APP store Z. And so on. Its not good for me as a developer unless I only want to target APP store X, which cuts the market for my apps way down. Or I can use some sort of multiplatform development kit/framework which will do the work of making cross platform/hardware binaries of whatever I am developing, which has its own limitations and trade offs.
So in summary, Steve Jobs does have a point about this and is not spouting straight bullshit. This time.
Anybody with actual apple phone and android phone development under their belt have anything to chime in with, one way or another? Not geek fan-boys of either system, but nerds with useful knowledge and experience to share?