Is this the kind of journalism Ars and Wired need to do to get access to Apple exclusives or something?
The linked article talks about how modders are unable to tweak the Xoom without Honeycomb source. It sounds like the author is confusing modding Honeycomb with developing apps for it.
27 Jan 2011: Preview released
22 Feb 2011: Officially released
24 Feb 2011: First Honeycomb device publicly available
3 Mar 2011: Fragments API for pre-Honeycomb release
So, there was less than a month before developers could even start doing any type of Honeycomb development before the first device was shipped. It has only been slightly more than a month before developers have had a stable API to use, and less than a month to have an API to try to do development that should work well on both tablets and phones.
So, I'm not surprised there aren’t more ‘native’ Honeycomb apps.
Because Honeycomb tablets will happily run older Android 2.x apps in a scaled up compatibility mode. The "Native" refers to apps specifically written just for Honeycomb or those existing apps which also specifically support Honeycomb.
The comparison in iOS was the way that iPad pixel-doubled existing iPhone apps, the iPad specific apps developed just for iPad, and Universal apps which were developed for both iPhone and iPad.
"My criteria for considering an app for this list is that it either requires Android 3.0 or have its user interface be specifically designed for a tablet experience. I didn’t count games or existing Android apps that are just upconverted to take advantage of the existing screen real estate. While it is a marginally better experience than trying to run an iPhone app on an iPad, I’m not counting it given that Apple doesn’t count the hundreds of thousands of iPhone exclusive apps in its 65,000 iPad app count."
So "native" seems to refer to having a redesigned UI, and if your UI naturally scales (displaying or taking pictures, showing video, 3D or vector based games, webpages, maps etc.) then that's not "native" by this definition.
Seems like a "no pain no gain" approach, if your app just works on multiple resolutions than that counts as a demerit for the OS, rather than as a good thing.
There also seems to be widespread ignorance about the pre-Xoom and pre-Honeycomb tablets that are out there. They're only for hobbyists since they don't ship with the Google Market, but people have been using them, and debugging their apps on them for many months.
"And even if developers wanted to create such a “true tablet experience,” they’re hard-pressed to do it without the source code for Honeycomb, which Google is currently keeping a tight reign over. The big device manufacturers working on Honeycomb-powered hardware—like HTC, Motorola and Samsung—all have early access to the code, but only after licensing agreements were made with Google. Smaller developers don’t have this luxury."
Why would he think the source to Honeycomb is required to make an app scale to different screen sizes and resolutions?
I'm also wondering what the definition of "native" is in the headline.