I do agree with you that the Apple app publishing restriction is pushing developpers too far, far enough to see some great developers give the plataform up not for technical reasons, but for their principles.
On the other side, as a music app developer I don´t know how you are happy with Android. First, a lot of developers (including me) can´t even figure out how to acquire audio streams from AudioRecord and play them using AudioTrack without problems such audio chopping, sample rate differences, distortion, ... (see how many posts without solutions we have here on this group). We can´t syncronize audio input and ouput, or audio output and video, so it gets hard to develop apps that need to handle those events precisely, such as samplers, music games, music makers based on gestures, etc. We don´t have a low latency audio interface to access (ALSA would be great and it´s already working on Android ... but we can´t access it), so give up virtual instruments and low latency audio apps (small buffers aren´t available too). We don´t have native audio interfaces officially supported by Google and AudioRecord (at least running on the emulator) warns buffer overflows if you just receive audio from it and play using AudioTrack on the same thread, it doesn´t matter which buffer sizes you use. The behavior of the apps running on different devices is unpredictable while on iPhone, since the archtecture and hardware is a lot more closely related on different devices and thought to be compatible, it ´s a lot easier to predict, test and publish apps that you know that will run as great as you intended them to be. On Android this is not something up to the developers to do, but to Google and the device developers that should garantee compatibility with the OS and what runs on top of it. I´m working on Android mostly because of Apple´s restrictions on it´s plataform, on publication, on development, on resources usage... But yes, I think Android still needs to play ball, and play a lot to catch iPhone + IphoneOS. And I hope it doest it! On 17 mar, 10:04, niko20 <[email protected]> wrote: > First off I like to write music apps, so I keep an eye on the music > apps that are out for iPhone. > > Two of these really popular apps are BeatMaker and Noise.IO. Beatmaker > is a sample driven sequencer MPC style, and Noise.IO is a full > featured FM synth. > > I read something disturbing in the app info yesterday that shows just > how much power Apple has over developers. > > In the past Beatmaker and Noise.IO had formed a way to share data - > the ability to export a synth sound out of Noise.IO and import it into > Beatmaker. It looks like Apple now "forced" them to change how this > sharing works - in fact so much so that currently the export feature > in Noise.IO is GONE! And the lastest reviewers of the app aren't happy > about it LOL. And the Beatmaker app indicates that import is gone in > the current update. Imagine LOSING functionality in an update! > Wouldn't that piss off a customer! Anyway the Beatmaker page mentions > something about having to switch over to Apple's copy/paste > functionality instead of the way they were using before, and that this > was requested by Apple. > > So that makes me feel much better about Android, I think it sucks when > a product that has been out for a long while already, and now Apple > comes in and bullies the developers to break their software basically > for no good reason except they want some control over how stuff is > done. How obnoxious. > > Also, I dont see how Apple is so "groundbreaking". I was looking up > specs on the iPhone OS 3.0 yesterday, and it didn't come out until > June/July 2009, this is when it finally got copy/paste, MMS, and Push > notifications. By the way Push notifications are where an app can get > notified to start when it receives some data, even though the app > isn't "running". Well, Android was well along the way already back in > 2008 and it had Widgets and Intents, which do this already. Push > notification is just a widget with an intent basically, and it came > out much later. > > I am not an Android Fanboy or an Apple fanboy, I always figure whoever > has the best tech wins in the end, I am writing Android apps and I > usually compare Apple apps to what I'm doing so I can see if such a > thing is possible at all processor speed wise, etc. I found that the > original iPhone processor was actually only running at 412Mhz or so, > and still has some good music apps, so that gives me a bit of info on > how those apps are written then. iPhone has objective C and can > compile to native code, but Android has NDK and you can also use > native code, so I should be able to still write comparable apps > processing power wise. > > So reading some of this info made me start to see how Android is > really ahead of the game in a lot of ways. Back in 2008 it already had > copy/paste, MMS messaging, and widgets and intents long before iPhone > OS 3.0..The hardware such as the touch screens still isn't as accurate > or as good, but the OS it pretty darn good, and it's nice not to have > big brother over your shoulder everytime you write an app. > > -niko -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
