In today's keynote at the annual Apple developer conference, company ceo Tim Cook repeats the spin that Android tablets don't have as many apps as do iPad tablets, as reported by Engadget:
There are now 650,000 apps on the App Store, 225,000 of them are iPad-specifically designed. "This compares to just a few hundred for our competition."
This is spin, because it is a negative for Apple.
It is true that there are fewer apps designed specifically for Android tablets than there are for iPad tablets. The difference is that apps have to be redesigned for iPads; on Androids, they don't. Mr Cook cannot admit the problem, because it is an embarassment that the foundation of iOS was poorly planned.
You know what happens when you run an iPhone app on an iPad: it appears small and centered on the large screen. Unless you click the 2x button, in which case the iPhone app appears large and fuzzy. iPhone apps must be rewritten to look correct on iPads; iOS developers have no choice in taking on this extra programming effort.
Not so on Android. Apps designed for small smartphone screens fill the larger screens of Android tablets, and look clear. Not half-size, not fuzzy.
Sometimes, however, Android developers will rewrite their smartphone apps for tablets to add UI features made possible by the larger screens. But for most apps, there is no advantage to the developer in rewriting his app for the big screen, and so there are "only" hundreds of tablet-specific apps for Android devices.
Update
Janko Roettgers over at GigaOM says much the same thing in "Here’s why Apple didn’t open up Apple TV." A digital tv represents two more resolutions that iOS cannot handle natively, while Android can.
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