Well you're going to have a hard time writing for iOS9 if the iOS9 SDK doesn't come with Objective-C bindings for the API. If they do that then practicality will dictate that you use Swift or a cross-platform language & toolchain. Sure you could create a wrapper for the SDK like some other cross-platform tools do but given that Objective-C is really only used for Apple's products it would seem pretty pointless and impractical.

Yes you're right that they can't actually force you and you could go way out of your way to get around their recommendations but we're obviously talking about a practical sense.

Obviously because screen resolution isn't the beginning and the end for usability.

So perhaps linking to the well-reasoned, objective posts would be appropriate. I understand this is an emotional issue for some people so an emotional response is expected but the vitriol-spattered posts don't do anything to progress the issue, they lead to it being dismissed as the agenda of "nutters" or "trolls" and such (the conspiracy theorist might say they are the work of the pro-systemd crowd ;) ).

If you want people to reverse course then more vitriol isn't going to work.

I like the optimism but an intuitive smartphone browser solved an actual problem, an Apple Watch browser (even if it's intuitive) still doesn't solve any problem, provide any advantage or improve on any workflow. Scrolling through the clickable areas is how WAP browsing worked on my dumbphone and that is just awful.

And finally they are starting to realize that Libre != Gratis. There are people working hard to produce software that they need and want, a side-effect is that you can get it for free and if you're not contributing then you're leeching and that is OK but you don't get to dictate what they do. Now if you are contributing then vote with your wallet and take your contributions elsewhere. The mentality of you entitlist little shits where you conflate this to mean they are "shoving systemd down your throat" is fucking absurd.

It's pure laziness, use Windows, use OS X, use BSD, use any one of the many Linux distros that does not have systemd, use a version of Linux distros from before they incorporated systemd and backport necessary patches. There are plenty of options out there but you just want it all done for you and all done your way for no cost. With this mentality I see why Free Software is still struggling to get mainstream adoption, most people are just in it for the gratis aspect. If systemd truly were a tiny minority pushing something largely buggy and unwanted on the masses then the Free Software ideology and the free market would have stamped it out by forking the existing distros. Maybe it is buggy but if so those who see that are too lazy to do anything about it.

NB: I have no opinion either way on systemd, it's just sad to see how far the Free Software movement is falling. If a well-reasoned, objective argument won't win them over then obviously resorting to vitriol won't, let it go and move on.

Most people didn't except in the case where they didn't have their laptop with them because it was a crappy user experience, then the iPhone came along and made the experience good. The Apple Watch needs you to have your phone with you for connectivity so I don't think many people are going to prefer browsing on a watch which is a poor experience where you have to scroll through clickable areas and can't type URLs when they can just use their iPhone.

Well that's the whole mantra of Free Software, you can either fix it yourself or pay somebody else to fix it for you. So many people still don't understand it isn't meant to be a gratis, leeching ideology. It's gratis due to it being libre, this doesn't mean you're entitled to have everything your way for no cost. If people share your view so much that they produce what you want and you are able to leech off that then good for you but if not then you need to contribute to producing what you want.

Yes but be it SATA cables, Ethernet cables or higher than 44.1/16 you will find people that will believe their confirmation bias over facts.

Why not? For a few bucks a month I can listen to whatever I want on whatever device I want. In the rare case I can only get some specific music by buying the digital version or buying the CD I'll do that but that's a pain because I have to sync it to all the devices I want to use and I don't always have access to it.

Why would it not perform well? Optimization would make it perform better it isn't a pre-requisite for it to perform adequately.

And of course we optimize for hardware, if you're doing GPU acceleration for example you're going to use the specific features of a particular GPU, if you want to utilize it effectively you don't just use the same path for all the different PowerVR GPUs, different Ardreno GPUs and different Mali GPUs. It would be quite a task to write an optimized implementation for all which is why iOS and Windows Phone do it only for a limited subset while Android goes for a generic approach. It's not going to exploit the hardware capabilities as well but it will work across more hardware.

I didn't realize this was something that changed so much for each Android version.

I get what you're saying, that you want it to be hardware agnostic and that's ok, but you know that it's just silliness to argue that optimizing for specific hardware isn't a real thing.

Yeah and my bookmarks and email sync to both.

Some, but relatively few exist on both. I have terrabytes of storage on my desktop and only gigabytes on my phone.

If you're just doing simple tasks then sure but most people will have a desktop because - even if only for a very small percentage of the time - they do something other than those simple tasks that cannot be handled by a phone or a tablet or an ultrabook.

How did you do that? When you long-press (in iOS8.3 anyway) the Apple apps (including iTunes) don't get the little 'X' to delete them like all the others. I have no real interest in deleting them (ones like the Apple Watch app just end up in my 'Junk' folder), just curious.

Well I did say it's good "if you're ok with that", (insofar as "that" references that the software is outdated and unsupported), now of course being "ok with that" is predicated on knowing it. If you don't know it then you can't really say whether you are or are not ok with it.

I don't know, maybe.

Maybe it has a warranty and if so I guess it would mean it has some level of support but whether that extends to the software being patched for security issues is possible but I would say unlikely.

Out of interest what is all this work that the OEMs have to do to make an Android version run on their hardware? I would have assumed it would be optimizations for the hardware but that doesn't seem to be the case.

What I mean is that the software is not particularly optimized for any hardware - and yes you point out that is the intention, that it be hardware-agnostic - but the performance suffers as a result. It's more of a brute force approach to getting more performance so naturally you end up with hardware being over-powered and under-utilized. Ultimately it means that the user experience of "Android" in general varies wildly depending on what device and what version you are running, but maybe you're right and that doesn't matter.

Obviously iOS is vastly different because of the hardware and software being made by the same company but Windows Phone for example offers a pretty consistent user experience across whichever device you use because they limit it to hardware for which the software is optimized.