When the iPhone originally launched, blindness charities were protesting that the touch screen interface would exclude visually impaired users. Less than a year later, the iPhone was being hailed as one of the greatest advances for visually impaired people since braille. Say what you like about Jobs and Ive, but they set the bar for accessibility.
By way of metaphor: Visually impaired people need to be extremely neat and tidy, because they can't easily navigate a messy environment. If you don't put things back on the shelves in exactly the same place every time, you're in deep trouble. Google have a really poor track record of putting things in the same place every time.
For users with other accessibility needs, the size and consistency of the iOS ecosystem is often crucial. iOS gets all the good apps and peripherals first, because it's a much easier development target.
Lol
No it is not
(Said as a former nexus 5 owner)
/conspiracyfallacysarcasm :)
Also, Apple will ban your app if it has the word "android" anywhere in it.
Rule 2.3.1:
"don’t include names, icons, or imagery of other mobile platforms in your app or metadata"
And here is a case where they actually enforced it:
Do you have a link?
I'm going to assume the original statement is FUD as accused. It does seem incredibly unlikely a dev could draw such a link even if Apple were doing that kind of penalisation (which makes literally no sense to me).
(I'll probably listen anyway since I like those guys, but still ...)
> Coincidentally, Russell Ivanovic is a case in point for what could happen if you defy Apple and launch on Android first. Ivanovic had initially been very lucky to have been assigned an Apple Developer Relations representative who gave him exclusive promotional opportunities. Few developers get assigned these representatives. Among the benefits Ivanovic received was the privilege to have Shifty Jelly's apps preloaded on iPads in Apple stores in Australia, a major marketing boost.
> Things went south In 2012, when Ivanovic launched a new version of the Pocket Casts app on the Android Play Store first, rather than Apple's App Store. The launch was a real success, and he publicly shared the good news. Before he knew it, his Apple Developer Relations representative stopped all contact. The representative would not even answer his emails. Ivanovic had been completely shut out.
Source: http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/3/24/fear-of-apple
But thanks for the info, I can see it certainly would stink to be treated that way, losing your benefits and being ignored by your contact.
I am not sure if this is "withdrawal of special treatment". These guys made great ios apps, both before and after they started making Android apps.
And it was those things which they lost right, rather than some kind of search position punishment?
Edit: Just checked App Store. Microsoft has literally hundreds of apps on there. You should probably go look. But I can't find the app I'm talking about lol
EDIT 2: Found a story on it! 11 years ago!! https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/07/7381/
It was called Photosynth and it seems to have disappeared from the Internet :(
EDIT 3: crap they just shut it down THIS YEAR! https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/photosynth/2017/02/06/micro... It was cool as hell!
Found a 10 year old demo of PhotoSynth here: https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photos...
This is the direction that needs to be undertaken with as much or more fervour than business automation applications.
I'm inspired!
I'm also impressed with Microsoft's effort here. It looks pretty nice, especially the different 'channels' metaphor for the various ML processing tasks (Scene, barcode, people, short text etc) for the visually impaired.
Reminder: This is a Microsoft marketing video, they are never like the actual product. See Kinect and Hololens teasers for more.
On the technical side, this is a perfect example of how AI can be used effectively, and is a (very obvious in hindsight) application of the cutting edge in scene understanding and HCI. There are quite a few recent and advanced techniques rolled into one product here, and although I haven't tried it out yet it seems fairly polished from the video. A whitepaper of how this works from the technical side would be fascinating, because even though I'm familiar with the relevant papers it's a long jump between the papers and this product.
On the social side, I think this is a commendable effort, and a fairly low hanging fruit to demonstrate the positive power of new ML techniques. On a site where every other AI article is full of comments (somewhat rightfully) despairing about the negative social aspects of AI and the associated large scale data collection, we should be excited about a tool that exists to improve lives most of us don't even realize need improving. This is the kind of thing I hope can inspire more developers to take the reins on beneficial AI applications.