I don’t have faith Google could even make a good app for the device considering the iPad YouTube app is janky as shit and it’s been on the platform for years.
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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the question is do they have any incentive to make a killer app on a direct competitor's platform?
Since the Android tablet space has been garbage for the last decade, I would assume they’d have at least put in some work to make the iPad app pretty solid.
But I don’t disagree with what you are saying, really. However, if a janky iPad is what they think will make people jump to Android, I have a bridge to sell them.
By garbage you mean Lenovo can offer a fast tablet with hdr, high frame rate display, 2k res, proper pen included and useful desktop mode for less than an iPad? Sorry but iPad is no longer offering competitive product in the tablet space.
It's not just a "competitive product". iPads are the entire tablet space.
Nope, iPads are less than 40% of the global tablet space
For the same reason androids are dominant in global market share. Because $5 pieces of shit in the third world that make no profit are the lion's share of that number.
If you're buying a tablet, and aren't buying a $100 piece of shit subsidized by Amazon, there isn't a single price point where a reasonable person would even remotely consider an Android over an iPad. Android is a terrible tablet OS with terrible support from apps, and the hardware only sounds OK on paper. Every iPad from the entry level up completely shits on every competitor on the market at a comparable price point.
First, you said iPads are the entire market and I just proved that isn’t remotely true, so accept that. Switching up the goalposts to insult people in markets that either don’t have access to iPads or can’t afford them isn’t ok.
Scale of economy isn’t the reason that globally Apple cannot go beyond 40% of that market, it’s a competitive market and Apple would need to sacrifice profit to sell at prices their competitors can to match them at scale. Apple will not be able to meet even their nearest neighbours down from Samsung because they will not scale their soaring profit margin down to match.
If you care the to be honest about subsidies then you may want to ask why Google dominates all Apple products and why Facebook used to - remember when Facebook had its own preferences before being migrated to the app settings? Apple has often subsidised product with brand relationships to certain third-parties to maximise profits.
As to your vague statement about every iPad shitting every competitor that is is bullshit and dismisses all value propositions in favour or brand comfort and some subjective synthetic benchmarks that rarely reflect real world experexperience. In practice I own a really great Lenovo tab that gives better than or equal to current gen iPad Pro experiences for much less. And I get to side load apps and remove bloat and ads at my behest. What do you get on an iPad? Whatever Apple supplies in the AppStore and that’s it. Wipr is ok if you are ok with Safari but you can’t easily or consistently remove ads from other Apps and you can’t recompile them on device to add features or remove other annoying ones. Synthetic benchmarks don’t tell the real story and never have.
They are the entire market. No one reasonable is buying anything over $100 that isn't iPad. There's nothing remotely competitive.
Pretending $50 junk machines that break in months, can barely handle Facebook, and only exist in the third world is the same market is laughable.
And yet, one of those sells significantly better than the other one.
Google’s core business is ultimately ad sales, and any way they can collect data on you to sell you ads, and the get you to look at those ads, is revenue for them. Sure they would be able to collect more data if they had full control over your device, but as long as you’re watching their ads at all they are making money.
yeah but this is a very niche product.
why invest whatever the fuck amount of money for 0.0001% of users to have a great ad-viewing experience, when they can just shoehorn the web app and play the ads anyway?
Yeah I agree. The web version is always available without the pretense of device-specific support, so until the platform is established there isn’t much of a motive.
I’ve had zero issues what so ever with the iPad app, what’s wrong with it for you?
I use my ipad with a trackpad a lot, and often with stage manager on an external display. Youtube doesn't play well with that set up. Oddly it'll switch which background color to show (like from dark to light) and as a result the text can get unreadable because the text doesn't always switch with it. The chat/info panes sometimes won't work when you click on them. I've had it not let me click the share button because the share button wouldn't load.
And, yes, Stage Manager is somewhat a niche use case, I suppose. But this isn't a mom and pop app dev. It's google.
Even out of Stage Manager, they don't support the cursor targets like apps are supposed to (maybe they are just using one build and shipping everywhere and hoping for the best). PiP sometimes doesn't work well, and you have to kill the app and restart.
They should do better with one of their flagship apps, is all I'm saying. And Apple, honestly, should do better on their end with stuff like this. They don't even have all native apps built for the Vision Pro that comes out in a couple weeks. It's like, you're the most profitable company on the planet and you don't even bother. It's crazy.
They'll launch their apps if/when Apple Vision Pro gains more traction.
YouTube is probably the biggest one missing, but it works just as well via a browser. Netflix has a lot of stuff but it's far from the only horse in town nowadays (and again, it should work fine via Safari). And Spotify is easily replaceable, as song availability is 99% identical between pretty much all music streaming services. People who want a Vision Pro will get it regardless of whether Spotify is available, and they'll likely just switch to Apple Music if they want to listen to music with the headset.
So…you can use the web version and can block all of their trackers and cookies with Safari extensions. Seems like it would be smarter for them to have their own app and get that data but whatever.
That’s what I’ve been doing basically the moment safari extensions released. It’s not perfect, but it’s far superior to the YouTube app.
Awesome. YouTube on Safari with an adblocker spares me all that ad bullshit on my iPad and iPhone and makes YouTube actually usable, also I never saw a big difference between safari and the shitty YouTube app in's terms of usability and you have features from the app without having to pay for.
Is that Dave2D?
It does look like that's him in the thumbnail! It'd make sense since only a handful of tech people have gotten to try the vision pro so far
Why invest time and money for what will likely be a small user base
There’s a toggle button to allow the iPad versions of their apps to run on visionOS. It would take one person less than four minutes to allow it. Is it an amazing experience on Vision Pro? No, but it would be a good one at least.
My understanding is that it’s the reverse of this. The iPad app is available by default. They’re putting in the (minimal) effort required to proactively disable availability of the iPad app.
Interesting, I’m away from my Mac but I’ll have to check this out later. As I recall, the other platforms were opt-in in AppStore connect.
Nevertheless, I’m sure Netflix has a ton of mobile developers with experience with universal apps, and they know what everyone has already experienced with the cross platform toggle options. You end up still having to code for, plan for, and QA the additional platform. It's never free. There are always issues that show up on the new platform / form factor.
It's never that easy. There's always platform specific bugs and weird edge cases, and that's just going from phone to tablet which are pretty similar, this is even more different.
Yeah, I’m a developer, and I’m accustomed to it. There are similar AppleStore Connect toggles to get iPhone apps onto iPad or MacOS. But the problem isn’t how easy it is to enable. It’s the future support.
My product, design, eng and QA teams have been burned by this in the past. Someone clicks the toggle, it shows up on the store, and then we start getting tickets from an all new platform. Internal and external people start finding issues that were not a problem on the other platforms.
Moreover, Apple doesn’t allow take-backs. You can’t easily remove a platform from a universal app. If you want one binary, and you decide that a platform is costing you more than it’s making you, then you’re kind of screwed.
Veteran developers know this, and that’s probably why they held off. I would’ve done the same thing unless there was some sort of back-side business development or marketing deal that depended upon being on the platform.
Good. Fuck YouTube and anything involving them. It’s about time people walk away from their shit.
Why invest into an ecosystem that will only ever have a tiny user population?
When succeeding versions release that don't cause people to choke on the price, I'm sure that services will see fit to support those platforms in the future, if the user base is large enough.
Looks to be a disruptive device the others are scared of, otherwise they wouldn’t care.
If you've worked with Apple's universal apps, you know that it's never truly free. Supporting the platform always brings new platform-specific bugs, platform-specific regression testing needs, product / design support for platform-specific experience quirks.
It's going to be some amount of work, for an audience that will likely be small at first, on a platform that is already supported by the company's web experience. IMHO "wait and see" is the prudent approach.
Just navigating their shitty submission process is a ton of work on its own.
Isn't doing nothing to support the device not caring?
Uh what? In what way would Spotify and Netflix be scared of this disruption?
Apple is a content producer now too and has much deeper pockets than their competition.
Why would the competition want people to buy into another cutting edge Apple product when they may want to develop their own solution to view their programming?
Your argument doesn’t make any sense. Spotify isn’t going to produce an AR headset and really doubt Netflix will either. It makes more sense for them to release apps for the device if they think it’s going to be successful.
You understand competitor right? They are content competitors, not hardware.
That’s my point. If they believe the hardware will be successful they would want to release apps for it that give them the ability to capture and retain customers. As it stands Apple headset users can only really consume Apple content. So it’s much more likely they just don’t believe in the product not that they’re scared.
You know they don’t need to develop custom apps right? They’ve even specifically disallowed their iPad app to run. That’s the action of a scared company.
No… that’s the decision of company who doesn’t want to invest in a new platform. They’d rather disable the app than support the users there.
Not making an app is caring? It’s not worth it to put the effort in. Small market.
Why would anyone want a Spotify app for this?
This is the sort of sentiment that shows how misunderstood this device is. No shade intended.
It’s not just a VR headset you play games in and watch movies in.
They are saying spatial computing because it’s a computer. Listening to music while you do other things is normal on a computer.
Fair point, but what would be beneficial about having an app vs just using the web browser?
Why do we ever want apps for anything? Because they are better integrated into the system, can offer more functionality and are just more convenient.
On a phone maybe. But on a computer what more functionality do you really get, since this is more like a computer?
Why is it so different on a „computer“? Sure, Spotify specifically is probably not a big deal and the only extra functionality for it are widgets and proper integration into Now Playing. Other apps benefit a lot more.