Author Archives: doug

When Twitter cared

Me, three years ago yesterday, naively:

Turns out it wasn’t great news. Tweetie was considered by many to be the first great iPhone app and its creator Loren Brichter gets due credit for inventing the now ubiquitous pull-to-refresh gesture. Instead of cultivating that greatness, Twitter bastardized its own iOS app into something that serves advertisers — not users — and has all but killed the market for third-party clients. I use Tweetbot across Mac, iPhone and iPad, but I am just waiting for the day when it stops working.

(Now would be a good time to again encourage everyone to join App.net, which actually cares about its users and developers.)

My home screen, always changing

20130408-002101.jpg

I am always interested by what people find worthy enough to put on their home screens. I have posted mine here and elsewhere in the past.

My iPad home screen was feeling a bit stale, so I just gave it a shake up. Mine is a mix of which apps I think I use the most and which ones I should use more.

I wish iOS provided a way to see which apps I actually use the most. It might vary quite a bit from this.

Fun with Android adoption numbers

Google was out touting Android version adoption yesterday, saying more than 50 percent of Android devices now run one of the two latest versions of the operating system. That’s a far cry from where they were in January, and the difference seems to come entirely from new adoption of Jellybean, with ICS holding steady at 29 percent and Gingerbread still making up a significant portion of the install base.

android-4-2-2013

Of course Google had to change their methodology to get Jellybean adoption to that point:

The new device dashboards are based on the devices of users who visit the Google Play Store (rather than devices that have checked-in to Google servers). As a result, the dashboards more accurately reflect the users most engaged in the Android and Google Play ecosystem—and thus most likely to download and use your apps.

It actually makes sense from a developer’s perspective to only show the part of the pie that might actually download your apps, but I wonder how far these number vary from the full pie and how much smaller the engaged pie is. If there is a significant difference in the size of the pies, that would seem to support the theory that many Android phones are not used as “smart” phones.

Why doesn’t Google open that kimono? Open is always better than closed, right?