Tweetdeck Founder Fires Back at Apple CEO’s Android Rant
On Apple’s recent Q4 earnings call, Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance and finally snapped. He hasn’t really said much about Android up until this point and he really went in. For a full five minutes, Jobs talked about how “open” doesn’t always win. He touched on the fact that activation numbers for Android seem to be inaccurate. He laughs off the idea that the iPad will have any competition. One of the most interesting points he makes is on the fragmentation of the Android Operating System, using Tweetdeck as an example:
“Twitter client, Twitter Deck [sic], recently launched their app for Android. They reported that they had to contend with more than 100 different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations present developers with a daunting challenge.”
Tweetdeck recently appeared in the Marketplace after a beta period. The free application is a pleasure to use and I definitely recommend giving it a shot, but I digress. Jobs references a post by Tweetdeck on their experience with the Android ecosystem, but takes it completely out of context. The original post says:
As we bring our initial Android TweetDeck beta period to a close, we wanted to quickly reflect on the Android ecosystem and what might be considered extreme fragmentation. To date we’ve had 36,427 active beta testers and below you can see the massive variety of phones and Android OS versions everyone is running. We were really shocked to see the number of custom roms, crazy phones and general level of customization/hackalicious nature of Android. From our perspective it’s pretty cool to have our app work on such a wide variety of devices and Android OS variations.
Then, they go on to detail the huge number of different Android flavors that their app works on. At no point do they say it was a challenge or difficult to develop for this environment. Tweetdeck founder Iain Dodsworth took it upon himself to respond to Jobs in a tweet, saying:
“Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn’t. It wasn’t.”
What is curious is that Jobs is even speaking on Android. His words say that he isn’t worried about competition for the iPad. He says that the fragmentation and “open” nature of Android isn’t the best thing for customers and Apple’s integrated approach is. So, why is he even talking about the competition if he doesn’t think they’re competition?
via TechCrunch, SAI
Category: News | Tags: android, apple, ios, steven jobs, tweetdeck
About the Author Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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