Excluding so many apps and web apps that enable you to write and test code on mobile/tablet? Excluding all the content writing and note taking apps? Excluding 'game builder' apps? I don't agree with your point. Android lets you run android sdk anyways.
> You should not run desktop apps on a phone, because smartphone have much less power.
You imply that having large power consumption is fine as long as the app is designed for desktop. I disagree: All apps should be as lightweight as possible to fight with the climate change and slow UI. I am using desktop Firefox on my Librem 5 just fine. All desktop plugins work, too.
> Android does not "restrict". It's an OS.
Android is designed in such a way that you cannot run desktop apps, despite the original Linux kernel.
>The same is true of most modern smartphones. If you wrote an app for an early version of iOS or Android, it simply won't run on modern hardware or software. APIs have changed, SDKs weren't designed with forward compatibility, and app store requirements have evolved.
Forward compatibility is not perfect, it got taken down a few times for compliance reasons (I think I had to fill out a form on whether my app was intended to be primarily used by kids?)
Still, it runs on modern devices with modern OS versions without a hitch. (Much faster than it used to on my HTC Hero in 2012). If you wanted to bemoan mobile functionality degradation, I'd aim at dependencies on communication with proprietary servers, which various companies don't feel obliged to keep around for long.
> This will not work for iOS. Why develop something which excludes a big chunk of the cake?
By that logic nobody should even create native Android apps today. You're saying that if Android apps could run on even more platforms it would somehow stop being worth it to create them because iOS is excluded? Makes absolutely zero sense.
> Android is designed in such a way that you cannot run desktop apps, despite the original Linux kernel.
What exactly do you mean by "desktop apps"? Of course it's not going to support KDE or GTK or QT or win32 or some other windowing API. But it's an OS, it can run software. And since it's open source, I don't see any reason why it would not run something.
Of course you would need to use the android API to do something, but it makes sense because it's a different OS.
It doesn't behave like a desktop OS, but as opposed to what, exactly? Desktop apps are a subset of software in general, desktop apps are not everything there is about software.
If you mean "I cannot run desktop apps because I need to redesign them so they can work on a phone", then yes, indeed, but a phone is not just "a small desktop".
> but doesn't this whole post completely ignore the 100 ton blue whale in the room? Namely smartphones.
This is patently false. Mobile developers do test their apps on smartphones, eventhough google and apple offer VMs. You'd be hard pressed to find a mobile app software house that doesn't have a dozen or so smartphones available to their developers to test and deploy on the real thing.
Have you ever written, debugged, tested, and deployed a mobile app solely from a smartphone? That's the point he was making. They're unequal in that the apps on them can't be made by them.
There's actually not, Android is supported as a target, not a platform the IDE runs on.
> I am curious, are there people out there who use Android device to code? I tried a bit QPython but it was frustrating not to be able to use the app I created from outside of QPython.
There are IDEs that will let you develop and build APKs on Android that have been around and supported for a while, which I wouldn't expect if no one was using them (e.g., AIDE.) QPython isn't exactly the top-of-the-line in terms of coding environments that run on Android.
> A kid today can't write software on a phone like you could with old computers.
On Android, at least, to the extent that that's a problem, its a convenience-of-the-form-factor problem (with tablets even this isn't really a big problem, especially with keyboard cases), rather than a lack-of-support problem (iOS, out of the box, is somewhat more locked down, but even there I think there are some options.)
There are quite a lot of on-device programming environments, largely free-of-charge, in the Google Play Store.
> So? There are still alternatives on good old laptops/desktops.
I can't carry a laptop in my pocket.
> What application of computing (not specific compiled binary, but rather generic spreadsheet, ssh, chat, etc.) is not available on Android?
I'm not sure how that is in any way relevant, but regardless you know very well that it is completely disingenuous to suggest that someone just "build a new app" for another platform.
Not every spreadsheet is the same. Not every chat app is the same. Someone isn't just going to go out and build another Fortnight because you can't get Fornight on the iPhone anymore.
> The smartphone form factor is just not very good for software development.
I believe with some androids you can connect it to a monitor and have a desktop environment styled mode, though at that point you'd be better served with a laptop.
> You either support the only semi open standard of apps being Android or your phone cannot succeed outside of some developer tool.
(1) iPhone and Android had exactly the same problem when they launched. (2) Web apps are a thing. (3) This problem would still exist if iOS didn't exist.
Again, in 2006 "smartphone" meant Nokia, Blackberry, and Palm. There's simply no such thing as a "captured" market when it comes to consumer goods.
Excluding so many apps and web apps that enable you to write and test code on mobile/tablet? Excluding all the content writing and note taking apps? Excluding 'game builder' apps? I don't agree with your point. Android lets you run android sdk anyways.
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