I wrote a reasonably in-depth post over at the Percolate blog on my thoughts on the marriage of Google+ and Android. Here’s a snippet:
As we all know, Google has very publicly announced its intention to build G+ into a massive social platform at any cost. For awhile I think many simply nodded and metaphorically patted Google on the head, as if to say, “sure Google, whatever you say.” However, as Android has continued to grow, I’ve noticed something very interesting: It seems that Google’s plan to turn G+ into a platform is to hitch its wagon to Android. With over a billion users it’s hard to argue with that strategy.
January 6, 2014 // This post is about: android, facebook, google, identity, social
I wrote a little post over on the Percolate blog about Android and how they handle sharing. A snippet:
Overall I’ve been very impressed, but the point of this isn’t to do a review of iOS versus Android (specifically 4.3 Jelly Bean). That seems useful to do at some point, but for now I want to talk about “intents”. This is the function that allows one application to pass you to another for a specific action. The place you see this most is in the share intent, which allows you to hit share in any application and have access to all the other apps you have installed that you might want to share that piece of content on.
This, for me, makes Android feel a lot more social than iOS, which requires each application to hard-code in their sharing functionality (except for the Facebook and Twitter integrations which happen at the app level). This is awesome both from a user experience standpoint (I don’t have to copy and paste anything) as well as a developer standpoint (if you’re building apps you don’t have to make decisions on which platforms to put in/leave out and you can easily register your app as a share service and make it available inside other apps).
Read the whole thing.
November 19, 2013 // This post is about: android, iOS, iphone, sharing, social
There’s lot of talk about the numbers from Black Friday. Twitter and Facebook didn’t fare well, mobile was up and iphone destroyed Android. Horace at Asymco asks the obvious question about the last stat: Why?
This I consider to be a paradox: Why is Android attracting late adopters (or at least late adopter behavior) when the market is still emergent? We’ve become accustomed to thinking that platforms that look similar are used in a similar fashion. But this is clearly not the case. The shopping data is only one proxy but there are others: developers and publishers have been reporting distinct differences in consumption on iOS vs. Android and, although anecdotal, the examples continue to pile up.
He’s not satisfied with the idea that android has a different demographic profile because of how many people own them now. So what could it be?
November 28, 2012 // This post is about: android, Mobile, UX
