Fortnite Skipping the Google Play Store

August 05, 2018

This is a real power play. Epic Games is planning to push Fortnite outside of the Google Play Store by asking users to install an APK file. This will help them run around the exorbitant 30% fee that Apple instituted and Google adopted for their app stores. This isn’t the first alternative app platform to appear on Android; companies like Baidu, Tencent, Itch.io, the open source F-Droid, and even Amazon have their own stores. But it is probably the first that will get major mainstream attention (and installs) in the west. Fortnite is big enough; this will probably work.

Android Catching Up to iPhone in Interest, Satisfaction

January 05, 2010

Ars Technica:

ChangeWave queried 4,068 current and potential smartphone consumers last month and noted that a full 21 percent said that they would prefer Android on their next smartphones—a jump of 15 percentage points from the year before. Comparatively, 28 percent of respondents said they would prefer iPhone OS; this makes the iPhone the leader in this category, though this number dropped four percentage points year over year.

Many iPhone developers and Apple enthusiasts are quick to shrug off the Android platform, for a variety of reasons ranging from aesthetic and design, to functionality and developer tools. Many of these criticisms are certainly valid. But iPhone has its own share of problems, and certainly is deficient in many ways to the Android.

With Google’s press conference tomorrow, and CES for the remainder of the week, there will be a lot of focus on the Android platform. It will become a much stronger platform in 2010. It will be interesting to see how Apple responds with iPhone OS 4.0 (which history suggests they’ll probably talk about in March).

Bells and Whistles for Google Mobile

January 02, 2009

Google’s iPhone app has some hidden features. The coolest of all is the live waveform while speaking into the microphone, although the most useful is the ability to open links from within the app itself.

The UI they use to enable the more advanced features is pretty intuitive, too. Just keep scrolling up, and the “Bells and Whistles” row will eventually appear.