Why PBS Won't Do Android 331
bogaboga writes "You might be wondering why the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service doesn't have a compelling Android footprint. I was wondering too; until they provided the answer. They say, 'Simply put, it’s too complicated for us to even consider an Android app for the first version; we’ll continue to support those viewers with mobile web. ... As we’re focused on the tablet for this project, we’re only designing for the larger screen sizes. But even there, there are a wide range of sizes and aspect ratios. It’s possible to build flexible sizing for these screen layouts, just as we do for the range of desktop web screen sizes. But the flip side to these wide variations is that in a touch experience, ergonomics plays an important role in the design. Navigational elements need to be within easy reach of the edges of the screens since people often are holding their tablets. If the experience is not fine-tuned to each variation the experience would suffer.' They also cite fragmentation. I'm left wondering whether they didn't find support for various screen sizes on Android developer website. Their budget is undoubtedly limited; are their concerns legit? What companies and organizations have developed Android applications that are good to work with on various screen sizes?"
The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
This mentality is not uncommon. Someone will see that there might be a problem somewhere and conclude that because they cannot have their vision of perfection, that they simply won't try at all. Consider this a victory for all of those screetching fanboys. They have achieved their desired result: FUD.
It doesn't have to be perfect. It needs to be useful.
So, rolling their own, with no experience then... (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds like they have zero experience in application design, much less for mobile devices, and never learned a thing about hardware abstraction, and are trying to micromanage the interface. Sounds like they even skipped web design, and are coming directly from the printed page mind-set.
My god, people, go out and hire an app developer, they are a dime a dozen, and every two bit Newspaper, TV station, TV-Network, football team, Grocery Chain, Department store, and gossip site has an app. They can be cookie cutter-ed from existing apps in less than a couple weeks by people who do this for a living. Stop hiring, and write a contract. Apps like these aren't that hard.
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
In that case their mobile web presence has the Android devices covered. It's not perfect but it is useful so why make a native app?
No, I'm not. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not just that they are favoring one proprietary platform vendor over everyone else but that they are also repeating their FUD too.
Re:So, rolling their own, with no experience then. (Score:4, Insightful)
This sounds like they have zero experience in application design, much less for mobile devices, and never learned a thing about hardware abstraction, and are trying to micromanage the interface. Sounds like they even skipped web design, and are coming directly from the printed page mind-set.
Sounds like most of the people for whom I've done web projects. They always try to tell me what it should look like, what drop down menus they think they'll need, etc... but when you try to pin them down on specifics regarding what it actually should do, it turns out they haven't spent much time thinking about that.
Re:Back up... Why would PBS write an app? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would PBS write an app? Not trying to be snarky, I just have no idea why a producer of TV programming would make one. Is it for showing TV schedules?
It's an app. You've got to write apps.
Just like, a few years ago, you had to replace local applications with web pages because everything was going to 'web apps'. Fads come, fads go.
I understand their pain (Score:5, Insightful)
As an Android and iOS developer, it is tough to support all possible screen sizes, aspect ratios, hardware specs and versions of Android. Sometimes not having a newer version of Android(>= 4.0) you miss a lot of features that people come to expect and your code is riddle with backwards compatibility stuff just to support Gingerbread, or worse(ie: Donut).
Of course, it doesn't help that Google just made the Action Bar part of the backwards compatibility package, after all of this time not supporting it and saying just use the Sherlock library, which has it's own share of complications and headaches.
With videos it's even harder, my new phone only records in *.3gp files(for video, Razr Maxx HD), which means you have to have more transcoding on the backend to make it available to others.
And then you have the Note and Note 2 which are just mini-tablets and not really phone sized anymore. And the lack of support in Android(which iOS has btw) to figure out if you are on a phone or not, really hurts the user experience.
The cost is great, and the hassle is hard to justify, so with a fixed budget I am not surprised they aren't developing for it just yet.
And think even with the fragmentation going on the iOS land, they still only have like 5 screen sizes to worry about (in the tablet area), so you can really tweak the user-experience on each version of the iPad/iPad mini to make the most of the real estate and hardware. Plus they all share a common base with most of the features already there, so it makes it easier to program for, and less backwards-compatibility stuff in your code to mess with and support
Re:So, rolling their own, with no experience then. (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds like they have zero experience in application design,
... and are trying to micromanage the interface. .
Most likely:
no
and yes
Sounds to me like designers talking. People who come from graphic design or ad-agencies and now do web design / interface design.
They usually want to micromanage the rendering. Because it has to look exactly as designed. Not just an interface with four buttons, but four buttons spaced in a perfectly pleasing way, perfect white space to text ratio, and please no substitute font! (Oh no, just the idea of that makes my black turtleneck crinkle.)
Re:I understand their pain (Score:5, Insightful)
Weren't we all promised that back when Java was up and coming and how well did that work?
But, those like you that have done both (and myself) realize how much of a fricking pain Android is to develop on. You can even have the same exact phone with different carriers and experience different issues. I don't know why Google doesn't restrict the rights to license the Android name more, to only phones that implement the APIs exactly as they should on the phone.. It is an absolute pain to debug Android issues.
Writing Android Apps is a breeze, I enjoy it. It is an issue when you go to QA them that you run into issues...
Reality is not FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
they are also repeating their FUD
No, it's that after actually examining real technical issues they found the FUD was not FUD at all, but a reality based concern where web apps on Android was the only feasible approach given the funds they had.
I am surprised more companies don't go the web route to support android - responsive design helps address the broad scale with many small increments, and Google has focused a ton on Chrome speed improvements over the ability to update older systems with newer development frameworks.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because user expectations of native apps are higher than those of web apps.
Users accept when top level UI elements of a web app scroll. They don't accept that with a native app. When was the last time you saw a native app scroll it's primary menu off the top of the screen for example. Most web apps do.
Re:Reality is not FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I wish more places stayed with websites instead of apps. I don't want to download an app for every place I could just visit on the web.
Re:Back up... Why would PBS write an app? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, nonsense. I've been watching PBS shows online for what, eight years now? The quality of their programs are top notch.
If you watch, for instance, a recent episode of Nature, there will be a quick 15 second ad at the beginning, and another 15 second ad somewhere around the halfway point. That's it. That's a hell of a deal considering the amount of ads that are played on Hulu (a paid-for service) dwarf what are shown on PBS, and they're all for Viagra to boot.
Does PBS nag a little bit sometimes to try and persuade users to donate? Sure, of course they do, but the best persuasion is the quality of their programming. Frontline, Nova, and Nature are probably three of the best programs in the world.
Re:So, rolling their own, with no experience then. (Score:5, Insightful)
My god, people, go out and hire an app developer
I'm a mobile app developer of 16 years standing, and programmer for more than 30 years. And I'm with him and not you. You don't know what you are talking about.
Sure it's easy to make a good desktop app with a arbitrarily resizable interface. And it's easy to make a poor mobile app with a arbitrarily resizable interface.
But the best mobile apps ARE designed for fixed size screens. That's because the screen size is small compared to the size of the minimum UI element (dictated by the size of a fingertip. Quite simply screen space is at a premium. Not only does the optimum specific arrangement of UI elements vary, the optimum UI hierarchy varies. Screen designs are best when a designer considers the specific sizes. Auto layout is a always a compromise, and one that gets worse the smaller the screens in question,
They can be cookie cutter-ed from existing apps in less than a couple weeks by people who do this for a living. Apps like these aren't that hard.
The answer here is that your standards are low. That's why you think auto-layout is good enough. His opinion differs not because he knows less than you, but because his standards are higher.
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I wish all mobile apps for websites would die horribly. Mobile web works, and works pretty much everywhere.
Re:So, rolling their own, with no experience then. (Score:4, Insightful)
How I know you're bullshitting:
I'm a mobile app developer of 16 years standing,
Apple IOS Development platform first release: February 2008.
Android Development Platform first release: August 2008.
Its 2013. You do the math.
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Android not as big as it appears (Score:2, Insightful)
Android is the biggest player today.
This is false from the standpoint of people writing apps other people will use.
Many Android phones are dirt cheap things not really suitable to run any applications on.
We already know iOS apps continue to pull in far more revenue... Android is growing but usual revenue is at least half as much.
PBS decision makers often show Apple products, they are Apple fans.
But then, so are most people.
That's the only reason why Android is being black listed.
Android is being supported through mobile web apps. That's hardly blacklisting.
Re:I understand their pain (Score:5, Insightful)
As an Android and iOS developer, it is tough to support all possible screen sizes, aspect ratios, hardware specs and versions of Android. Sometimes not having a newer version of Android(>= 4.0) you miss a lot of features that people come to expect and your code is riddle with backwards compatibility stuff just to support Gingerbread, or worse(ie: Donut).
And none of this would be a problem if PBS would simply publish the specification for whatever JSON/XML/etc back end they are using to transmit information to the clients about shows and episodes, and use standard RFC-compatible video formats and streaming protocols with no DRM or other nonsense.
Why would it not be a problem? Because the next day the app stores would be full of "SparkleVideoPlayer now supports PBS!" updates for all of the existing streaming video apps and their loyal users. Or if my screen size, aspect ratio, blah, blah, blah is not supported, I can write my own app!
I can understand why the commercial TV outfits want to control everything - they think it's the only way to poison the experience with ads. But why are public broadcasters like PBS, BBC, and Australia's ABC doling the same thing? It's idiotic - the solution to "how do I support a million devices" is simple: "publish the spec so that the taxpaying public can write their own apps".
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reality is not FUD (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The ipad app is superb (Score:2, Insightful)
Android is, well, inconsistent and fragmented. There are android phones that are rock solid and phones that are absolute shit (lockups, random reboots. etc). Now mix that with all the various versions of Android OS and it becomes a real problem ensuring quality control for your entire PBS audience. With the iPhone, development and expected results via testing are easier to manage.
Quality control is the last thing you think about when you think "PBS". Many of them are run by local community colleges, and while there's some great stuff put out it's often not professional quality in terms of the production.
The real answer is that PBS relies on grants and public funds, and Apple has always had their claws deep into those types of markets. I'm sure if Google started supplying a bunch of funding to them, they'd develop for it in a heartbeat.
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
But in the case of PCs, the variation is from "plenty big enough" to enormous. You can aim at the lowest common denominator on the PC and it's fine, and if the user has more real estate, great. On phones, you really have to take advantage of the space the machine gives you.
Re:Mobile apps and screen sizes, legit problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Tiny screen? Tiny buttons. Tiny text.
Big screen? Big buttons. Big text.
That's a really stupid design concept.
Ideally, on touchscreen devices:
- The right size for buttons is about the size of my finger (Which is fairly constant for most humans)
- The right location for buttons is where my finger can reach it easily. (Again, fairly constant for most humans)
- The right size for text is so it's readable. (That can be quite variable for many humans, and also depend on screen resolution and technology)
If I have a bigger screen, I want to display more information, rather than display the same amount of information in a bigger text.
Also if the designer is really dumb and scale everything to full screen, then aspect ratio is messed up and the pictures look weird
Web sites are sometime hard to use on phones because it's hard to click on links, which are buttons the same size as text. My eyes have better definition than my finger. Phone apps that are not optimized for tablets are wasting the tablet potential.
Running an phone app on a desktop machine is usually a terrible experience.
Apple didnt solve that problem any more than Android, they just have less of it. But they do have that same problem for iPad vs iPad mini. Some apps are harder to use on mini because buttons and texts were sized for the big ipads.
Websites can usually achieve useful compromises.
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
The mind boggles, not only that a place developing games for computers has no programmers on staff - but that they fail to see this as a problem. Worse yet, they think that programmers *are* the problem.
Re:The ipad app is superb (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mobile apps and screen sizes, legit problem (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that mobile computing finally found success in iOS and its copy-cats due to the thoughtful simplification of the UI/UX. Desktops are by nature a different beast, and 15 years of translating the desktop UX to the tablet/mobile was a failure until Apple re-designed what mobile UX should be in the first iPhone.
Your thinking is clearly a programmers view, not an end-users. Which is why you, and most programmers, desperately need UX designer help on your projects.
I just bought a Nexus 7 2nd gen off the internet. I was blown away how little Google understands good UX/UI, and the need of the OS to be user-centric in allocating resources. The device while sporting very fast a quad core 1.5 Ghz processor and 2GB of RAM, has the slowest user response I've ever seen. It was 4-8 times slower at responding to user touch, and in UI transitions the a 2 year old iPad2, despite having 3-4 times the hardware resources! I had to drop the idea of supporting Android in our app, because I can't even get acceptable behavior on Google's own super-tablet.
This type of thinking, that has programmers worrying about geeky things like what kind of multi-tasking they have or whether they can root the device, has kept Android from focusing on what is #1 importance: the user. And while I have no doubt the Android will take the majority of the marketshare with poor-performing low-cost devices and Google and Amazon selling quality hardware below cost because they have ulterior motives... in the end the market will suffer because Android is being driven primarily by least common denominator market politics and a programmer-centric point of view.