What the comment says is that the third-party app ecosystem on Android is shitty. Which is not the same thing as saying that Android itself is shitty, or that Google’s apps are shitty.
Just that for various reasons, statistically, 90% of third-party android apps are shitty. This is absolutely true, but then again, judging an ecosystem by 90% of its apps is probably not very helpful.
90% of everything is crud, as Phil Sturgeon remarked. App ecosystems have winner-take-all economics, so 90% of the apps are poorly funded things thrown into the world like notes in bottles thrown into the sea.
If we lower the barriers to entry, we necessarily get more crud. The big question for a user is not whether 70%, 80%, or 90% of the apps are crud, it’s whether there are enough good apps for each user to have a good experience, and whether those good apps are discoverable.
The open web has created a world where 99.9999999% of all web pages are shit. But we don’t care right now, because HN isn’t one of them, and making it open makes it easier for the HNs of the world to be created.
If there was a “web gatekeeper” charging “developer membership” subscriptions, there would have been fewer shitty web pages, but no HN or raganwald.com either.
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I leave it as an exercise for the reader to ask whether Apple’s ecosystem is also 90% crud. It could be the case, but if you find the apps you need and they’re excellent, how would you ever know what the other five million iOS fart generators and home-brew to-do list apps look like?
> What the comment says is that the third-party app ecosystem on Android is shitty. Which is not the same thing as saying that Android itself is shitty, or that Google’s apps are shitty.
Just that for various
A lot of Android (and iOS for that matter) first party apps are also shitty, so the provenance doesn't really matter.
> It could be the case, but if you find the apps you need and they’re excellent, how would you ever know what the other five million iOS fart generators and home-brew to-do list apps look like?
How is that any different compared to Android? I have found the apps that I need and are excellent, and I don't care about the rest.
I am in no way saying that the Apple ecosystem is superior to the Android ecosystem, or that Keynote is superior to Slides or PowerPoint, for that matter.
Just that all reasonably open ecosystems are full of crud, and while pointing out that any one ecosystem is full of crud is true, it is also not a particularly helpful.
The provenance of the Phil Sturgeon quote is helpful. He was praised for being an excellent author, and asked why he wrote SciFi, a genre in which 90% of the published works were crud.
His remark that “90% of everything is crud” illuminated a truth that people tend to associate the quality of a genre they like with the good works in that genre that they are familiar with, while associating the quality of a genre they don’t like with the mean or even worst works in that genre.
It absolutely is the same between Apple, Android, and Microsoft. I’m an Apple person, I found the set of apps I need, I think they’re excellent. My brother is all-in on Google, from Android to hardware, everything. He also has an excellent set of apps he needs, I have no reason to think he’d be happier switching to Apple.
Apple is years late to everything, so the marketing narrative around that is "Apple would rather do it right than do it early".
No thanks. Happy to be 'early' to mouse, kb, pen and external monitor support on Android. Just got a foldable phone that's perfectly combined my phone + tab use cases, so I can do it all on one device.
