5 ms·

Agora phone exposes Android’s Achilles Heel

22 points by raganwald 18y ago

Anon84 18y ago
This sums it all up pretty nicely: Similarly, Win32 API was proprietary but resulted in the largest app platform ever. Apple’s FairPlay DRM is proprietary but created the largest legal media ecosystem to date. So while the power of proprietary platforms to create large markets has been demonstrated, the ability of open source to create large and lucrative markets coherent enough to attract commercial developers in the consumer markets is yet to be proven. Ironically, if the iPhone platform can fail to dominate the smartphone market because it’s too closed, the Android platform may fail because it’s too open.
- halo 18y ago
  the ability of open source to create large and lucrative markets coherent enough to attract commercial developers in the consumer markets is yet to be proven. What about the web?
  - jws 18y ago
    You mean the one that grew into a large commercial market dominated by the proprietary Internet Explorer, Netscape Browser, and Netscape Server? [Netscape server was never a huge percentage of the servers, but it was the server of choice for companies during the period when the web turned from computer oddity to "thing real people use". The netscape browser only became open source in their death spirals.]
pxlpshr 18y ago
Any company can adopt the open source OS to get into the cellphone market and, thus, the Android ecosystem will consist of many disparate and incompatible interests. wow, couldn't agree with this more. this is exactly why I've been on the fence about going after Android till it matures a little more. Apple is closed-platform, and I understand that its often an issue in the hacker community but I honestly see it as an enabler... particularly for indies and small shops. Until the iPhone and OSX, gone were the days of the small teams. To build for Windows configurations, you often had huge cost sinks like support and QA... likewise for the gaming industry. Now hackers have things Microsoft's XNA and the iPhone that are giving small, visionary teams the ability to create AND MORE IMPORTANTLY produce to the WORLD out of their garage (oh, and reap direct fiscal rewards).
- halo 18y ago
  Once again, the web, a completely open standard and largely built on open-source software. The web has done much more for "hackers", "indies" and "small shops" than the iPhone, OS X and XNA have /combined/. Let's not forget that the iPhone bases much of its popularity on the web either.
  - pxlpshr 18y ago
    I think your point can tip in either direction because I see the "open success" of the consumer web relying a lot on 3 or 4 dominant browsers who are tackling the hardware issue for you, thereby giving you a platform to develop on. Not to dissimilar from the benefits of working with Adobe AIR / Silverlight. What the web doesn't offer is a direct publishing path to the consumer, where commerce occurs with one-click, and installation is seamless. +1 for XNA and iPhone.
  - Angostura 18y ago
    ... because it is so much fun developing for IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Lynx, et al.
- philh 18y ago
  I'm not sure that fragmentation is necessarily what killed small teams, at least for video games - my understanding is that they survived pretty well in days when you had the NES, Commodore 64, Amiga, Apple II, etc. And many (most?) games got ported to several of those, whether by the original team or another, so customers weren't especially put out either. What killed small teams was that it became impossible to produce and sell a modern video game as one. XNA is making that possible again. Likewise, the iPhone makes distribution easy for mobile phone apps. If Android can replicate that, then hackers will be able to find ways to deal with variable featuresets. They'll lose some simplicity, but openness will give them benefits as well. I think it will be a net win for customers and developers, but I'm not certain. Time will tell.
halo 18y ago
Terrible companies can make terrible products irrespective of whether they're running Android or not. The only difference being is that if it is running Android, articles like this are written. Edit: the iPhone has climbed to the top of the most popular smartphones in the U.S. I'm not sure why people keep repeating this dubious fact. Blackberry is the most popular in the US, Nokia are worldwide.
- gaius 18y ago
  Because there are lots of different kinds of Blackberries.
  - halo 18y ago
    Except the author of the article explicitly says they didn't mean that: The iPhone has climbed to the top of the most popular smartphones in the U.S. with a single model.
    - Retric 18y ago
      iPhone is number one in sales even if not in market size. http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/10/22/picture-iphones-rapid-growth-vs-blackberrys-slow-and-steady http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/10/22/picture-iphones-r... PS: OK, Q4 is probably a peek for the iPhone, so 2009 sales might not be a win for the iPhone.
cx01 18y ago
German IT news site heise has some interesting information regarding this: http://www.heise.de/mobil/Fehlstart-Android-Handy-Kogan-Agora-kommt-nicht--/newsticker/meldung/121890 http://www.heise.de/mobil/Fehlstart-Android-Handy-Kogan-Agor... Allegedly an unknown HTC executive told an Australian magazine that Kogan actually never had the money to build a smartphone. The compatibility problems were only used as an excuse.
andreyf 18y ago
People run browsers in different resolutions, and developers learned to deal with that... Although I can see how it can appear this way to customers, this isn't really Agora's problem, it's developers'.
mattmaroon 18y ago
"Any company can adopt the open source OS to get into the cellphone market and, thus, the Android ecosystem will consist of many disparate and incompatible interests." Sounds like what someone would have said about Windows in the early 80s, minus the open source of course.
rbanffy 18y ago
The summary: The Agora has hardware that's different from the G1. Developers write software that, boneheadedly, rely on features of the G1 and won't run correctly on the Agora. Suddenly, Open Source and Diversity are to blame. Let the phones hit the market and let developers sort this one out. They should be clever enough to deal with different screen form-factors, resolutions, pointing devices and every other different gizmo one decides to put in a phone. More than any other Java platform, Android means "write once, test everywhere".
- there 18y ago
  > Let the phones hit the market and let developers sort this one out. exactly. there has been 1 device on the market for developers to play with so far, and the android emulator emulates the g1's form factor by default. put another device out and developers will quickly adapt their code for it, but until now there hasn't been any reason to. come on kogan, we're all waiting on you.
zmimon 18y ago
I'm not sure you can generalise anything from the Agora ... it was always a bit unbelievable that a minnow sized vendor could outdo every other cell phone provider on the planet to become the second Android phone. My guess is that these "interoperability" issues are more like "we tried 100 android apps and only 1 of them worked on our phone because we really didn't test it at all and now only just realized that we made a complete failure". But I will say that as soon as I saw it I scanned the specs and figured I would never buy it because of the low screen resolution. That was pretty bone headed right from the start.

22 points by raganwald 18y ago

This sums it all up pretty nicely: Similarly, Win32 API was proprietary but resulted in the largest app platform ever. Apple’s FairPlay DRM is proprietary but created the largest legal media ecosystem to date. So while the power of proprietary platforms to create large markets has been demonstrated, the ability of open source to create large and lucrative markets coherent enough to attract commercial developers in the consumer markets is yet to be proven. Ironically, if the iPhone platform can fail to dominate the smartphone market because it’s too closed, the Android platform may fail because it’s too open.

halo 18y ago
the ability of open source to create large and lucrative markets coherent enough to attract commercial developers in the consumer markets is yet to be proven. What about the web?
- jws 18y ago
  You mean the one that grew into a large commercial market dominated by the proprietary Internet Explorer, Netscape Browser, and Netscape Server? [Netscape server was never a huge percentage of the servers, but it was the server of choice for companies during the period when the web turned from computer oddity to "thing real people use". The netscape browser only became open source in their death spirals.]

pxlpshr 18y ago

Any company can adopt the open source OS to get into the cellphone market and, thus, the Android ecosystem will consist of many disparate and incompatible interests. wow, couldn't agree with this more. this is exactly why I've been on the fence about going after Android till it matures a little more. Apple is closed-platform, and I understand that its often an issue in the hacker community but I honestly see it as an enabler... particularly for indies and small shops. Until the iPhone and OSX, gone were the days of the small teams. To build for Windows configurations, you often had huge cost sinks like support and QA... likewise for the gaming industry. Now hackers have things Microsoft's XNA and the iPhone that are giving small, visionary teams the ability to create AND MORE IMPORTANTLY produce to the WORLD out of their garage (oh, and reap direct fiscal rewards).

halo 18y ago
Once again, the web, a completely open standard and largely built on open-source software. The web has done much more for "hackers", "indies" and "small shops" than the iPhone, OS X and XNA have /combined/. Let's not forget that the iPhone bases much of its popularity on the web either.
- pxlpshr 18y ago
  I think your point can tip in either direction because I see the "open success" of the consumer web relying a lot on 3 or 4 dominant browsers who are tackling the hardware issue for you, thereby giving you a platform to develop on. Not to dissimilar from the benefits of working with Adobe AIR / Silverlight. What the web doesn't offer is a direct publishing path to the consumer, where commerce occurs with one-click, and installation is seamless. +1 for XNA and iPhone.
- Angostura 18y ago
  ... because it is so much fun developing for IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Lynx, et al.
philh 18y ago
I'm not sure that fragmentation is necessarily what killed small teams, at least for video games - my understanding is that they survived pretty well in days when you had the NES, Commodore 64, Amiga, Apple II, etc. And many (most?) games got ported to several of those, whether by the original team or another, so customers weren't especially put out either. What killed small teams was that it became impossible to produce and sell a modern video game as one. XNA is making that possible again. Likewise, the iPhone makes distribution easy for mobile phone apps. If Android can replicate that, then hackers will be able to find ways to deal with variable featuresets. They'll lose some simplicity, but openness will give them benefits as well. I think it will be a net win for customers and developers, but I'm not certain. Time will tell.

halo 18y ago

Terrible companies can make terrible products irrespective of whether they're running Android or not. The only difference being is that if it is running Android, articles like this are written. Edit: the iPhone has climbed to the top of the most popular smartphones in the U.S. I'm not sure why people keep repeating this dubious fact. Blackberry is the most popular in the US, Nokia are worldwide.

gaius 18y ago
Because there are lots of different kinds of Blackberries.
- halo 18y ago
  Except the author of the article explicitly says they didn't mean that: The iPhone has climbed to the top of the most popular smartphones in the U.S. with a single model.
  - Retric 18y ago
    iPhone is number one in sales even if not in market size. http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/10/22/picture-iphones-rapid-growth-vs-blackberrys-slow-and-steady http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/10/22/picture-iphones-r... PS: OK, Q4 is probably a peek for the iPhone, so 2009 sales might not be a win for the iPhone.

cx01 18y ago

German IT news site heise has some interesting information regarding this: http://www.heise.de/mobil/Fehlstart-Android-Handy-Kogan-Agora-kommt-nicht--/newsticker/meldung/121890 http://www.heise.de/mobil/Fehlstart-Android-Handy-Kogan-Agor... Allegedly an unknown HTC executive told an Australian magazine that Kogan actually never had the money to build a smartphone. The compatibility problems were only used as an excuse.

andreyf 18y ago

People run browsers in different resolutions, and developers learned to deal with that... Although I can see how it can appear this way to customers, this isn't really Agora's problem, it's developers'.

mattmaroon 18y ago

"Any company can adopt the open source OS to get into the cellphone market and, thus, the Android ecosystem will consist of many disparate and incompatible interests." Sounds like what someone would have said about Windows in the early 80s, minus the open source of course.

rbanffy 18y ago

The summary: The Agora has hardware that's different from the G1. Developers write software that, boneheadedly, rely on features of the G1 and won't run correctly on the Agora. Suddenly, Open Source and Diversity are to blame. Let the phones hit the market and let developers sort this one out. They should be clever enough to deal with different screen form-factors, resolutions, pointing devices and every other different gizmo one decides to put in a phone. More than any other Java platform, Android means "write once, test everywhere".

there 18y ago
> Let the phones hit the market and let developers sort this one out. exactly. there has been 1 device on the market for developers to play with so far, and the android emulator emulates the g1's form factor by default. put another device out and developers will quickly adapt their code for it, but until now there hasn't been any reason to. come on kogan, we're all waiting on you.

zmimon 18y ago

I'm not sure you can generalise anything from the Agora ... it was always a bit unbelievable that a minnow sized vendor could outdo every other cell phone provider on the planet to become the second Android phone. My guess is that these "interoperability" issues are more like "we tried 100 android apps and only 1 of them worked on our phone because we really didn't test it at all and now only just realized that we made a complete failure". But I will say that as soon as I saw it I scanned the specs and figured I would never buy it because of the low screen resolution. That was pretty bone headed right from the start.