Welcome to the forty-fourth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Mobile. In this edition, Adrian argues that using cross-platform UI frameworks is a bad business decision; Graham discusses the current duopoly in the smartphone market; and in the Library section, Adrian reviews the work of Erica Sadun.
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On The Duopoly Of Mobile
It is surprising how quickly the duopoly of iOS and Android, Apple and Google, became entrenched. At the 2007 iPhone launch event, Steve Jobs compared the touchscreen-centric iPhone UI with four other competitors: the Moto Q, BlackBerry, Palm Treo, and Nokia E62. The Moto Q ran on Windows Mobile, the last release of which was in 2010. BlackBerry had replatformed onto Android in 2015, joining the duopoly. Palm effectively stopped making anything (even at its new home in HP) in 2011, then popped up again in 2018 making Android devices. The holdout was Nokia, who partnered with Microsoft in 2011, sold to them in 2014, and (as Microsoft Mobile) closed…
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It Is Not The Types That Will Help You
We go back and forth, if you will pardon the pun, on whether programs have types or not. In the very early days of digital computers you had digits (as likely to be decimal or octal as binary), and that was your lot. But then still in the very early days of digital computers you had LISP, which has two types: atoms and lists. In the sort of early days of digital computers you got BASIC which has a whopping three types: numbers, strings, and arrays.
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Janet Abbate
We are told that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. This is certainly true of the history of computing, at least as far as its telling is concerned.
