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Publisher on Android


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As there is a version of Publisher on iPad may I perhaps hope that there will be a version for the other many thousands of tablet enthusiasts, not to mention the many smartphone users, who run Android as an operating system. Somewhere in the future maybe.

John

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6 hours ago, jrkay said:

As there is a version of Publisher on iPad

Really?

P. S. Serif's opinion on Affinity Android versions is well known in the forum (discussed very often here).

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23 hours ago, ErrkaPetti said:

Android people are not willing to pay for their software like iOS people

I don't believe for a minute that this as a blanket statement is true.  Android devices tend to be cheaper (in more sense than one) so there will likely be a greater proportion of Android users that are more interested in saving money and use the less expensive products, but that doesn't mean that ALL Android users are like that, or that they wouldn't be interested in superior options if they were available on the platform.

I personally have both an Android tablet and an iPad.  The iPad is generally superior in terms of its hardware and in terms of the availability of creative software, such as the Affinity products and various music-related apps and tools; however, some of the security restrictions in the app store make it virtually impossible to bring out certain categories of network/IT-related functionality, so for a tablet intended for doing any kind of network diagnostics (as an example), Android has a bit of an edge.  Each of them has its strong points.

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19 hours ago, ErrkaPetti said:

Develope software cost a lot of money, and just now tablet money is where Apple is...

On the other hand, if I were to develop a tablet application for my own use that I did not want to distribute, I would be much more likely to develop it for Android, in spite of the fact that I do like iOS as a user.

The reason is that with iOS, to deploy the application to the device, my understanding is that the only way to get it there without going through the app store (making it public) is to use a temporary certificate that would expire - even if there were no changes to the application, I would need to reinstall it periodically to keep it working with a renewed certificate.  I would find this to be quite annoying, and Android does not have this issue.

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23 minutes ago, fde101 said:

my understanding is that the only way to get it there without going through the app store (making it public) is to use a temporary certificate that would expire - even if there were no changes to the application, I would need to reinstall it periodically to keep it working with a renewed certificate.

While this is technically true (the development distribution certs expire annually), if you've developed the app in the first place (or are enough of a developer to side-load someone else's app by building it in Xcode and installing it on your device), the reality is that you're talking about 10 seconds of effort each year to "renew the cert and rebuild", especially with the automatic certificate management that removes much of the former pain-and-suffering that used to be there. If that's enough of a detriment/annoyance to prevent such a path, ok.

(NOTE: If you're thinking about the 90-day expirations of TestFlight builds, that would not apply to you as a developer and devices registered as development devices -- that's for "external" testing and yes, the requirements there are, among other reasons, to prevent circumvention of the App Store. If you're thinking about Enterprise Distribution, some big names recently were caught abusing this program but it's yet another way to get apps into the hands of users in a defined environment without "going public" through the App Store.)

On the primary topic of building a for-profit app for Android, the business cases are really difficult to make in general; in specific there may be niches, but issues surrounding willingness to purchase, piracy, security, fragmentation, and privacy all are predominantly negative in the Android world vs iOS. I have multiple apps in the App Store and never-say-never but there's currently no compelling reason to invest the development effort on that platform and I've been watching for at least one business for almost 5 years; the landscape simply hasn't changed enough to make it worthwhile.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 9/22/2019 at 12:24 PM, ErrkaPetti said:

One more important thing: The piracy on Android platform is widely know, and, for developer that can be the easy choice to choose iOS over Android...

Develope software cost a lot of money, and just now tablet money is where Apple is...

I think you need to provide a citation for this. I work in software development and follow this type of thing, and what you say is news to me. You sound like an Apple fanboy.

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18 minutes ago, Bill Rosmus said:

Ignoring more than half the mobile market

Why don't you take unique opportunities as a "worker in software development"?

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45 minutes ago, Bill Rosmus said:

I think you need to provide a citation for this. I work in software development and follow this type of thing, and what you say is news to me. You sound like an Apple fanboy.

I'm not the poster you refer to but unless you're being picky about one word, "tablet", it's long been known that iOS is more profitable (here's one of many sources):

as far as piracy on Android, it gets a little trickier to document in a more general way because many of the reports I found in my quick search talked about the numbers in terms of a specific app which makes the argument more anecdotal. Also surprisingly, most of the noise about android piracy specifically is from the 2015/1026 era; these days the message is more about embedded malware and bad actors swamping Google Play despite the attempts to curb it. (piracy: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/piracy-android-how-bad-is-it-really/

 -- malware: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/malicious-pop-up-ad-apps-slipped-past-google-play-security-to-reach-millions/)

Bottom line is that the Android market as a whole leaks like a sieve and while there may be pockets of parity, iOS users are less likely to pirate (since it usually takes jailbreaking to accomplish this) and measurably more likely to spend money (weirdly, also from 2016: https://www.androidauthority.com/new-report-reveals-that-ios-users-spend-2-5-more-on-in-app-purchases-than-android-users-700983/), making the business case for Android Affinity Suite is difficult at best.

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1 hour ago, Bill Rosmus said:

If I were an investor, I wouldn't give Serrif any money. Ignoring more than half the mobile market smacks of corporate negligence.

You sound like an Android fanboy.

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4 hours ago, ErrkaPetti said:

Bill Bill Bill, hold your horses here...

Almost every bigger software company ignores Android as a platform for developing software... Not just Serif...

Show me some links of big software companies that has released software optimized for Android tablets, OK?

Adobe? Microsoft? Ableton? Korg?  

 

Adobe Lighroom. How's that sunshine?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adobe.lrmobile&hl=en_CA

And I've installed it on my Android device. It was free. I'd rather not have, but I have no intention of buying Apple.

The whole notion that Apple is the best platform for media editing is two decades outdated. It was from before the Pentium chip and had to do with memory segmentation in the old 8086 processors (yes I could write in Assembly language at one time... probably still could but I don't want to).  Memory segmentation led to poor performance. The Motorola processors used by Apple computers at the time didn't have memory segmentation so were faster; better for processing stuff requiring large memory allocation. Like media files. When the Pentium came along Intel fixed the problem and Apple no longer had that advantage. Now Apple uses the same Intel chips that Windows uses. And Android uses plenty powerful processors on the flagship devices.

There is nothing about Apple that is particularly better than Android devices for mobile and Windows devices for PCs/laptops, except maybe financial returns since their fanboys will pay top dollar for what is essentially average. Which means there are more Android devices because there aren't that many suckers out there with the kind of money required to buy Apple. Which makes a good reason to offer Affinity Photo to those on Android. Because they are smart enough not to want to buy very expensive things that aren't worth the money. And Serif advertises itself as the low cost alternative.

Any more questions?

Edited by Bill Rosmus
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  • 5 months later...
On 10/5/2019 at 1:20 AM, Bill Rosmus said:

The Motorola processors used by Apple computers at the time didn't have memory segmentation so were faster;

Prior to the 386, the Intel chips were also only 16-bit, while the Motorola chips Apple used on the Mac were 32-bit from day one (the first chips only used 24 bits for memory addressing and had a 16-bit data bus and 16-bit ALU, but they had 32-bit registers and the instruction set simulated a 32-bit environment, so the software could take advantage of real 32-bit math as soon as they moved to the 68020).

With the introduction of the 386, 32-bit became available on the PC side of things, but the underlying environments (DOS, Windoze) used a mixture of 16-bit and 32-bit code for a long time, and switching between the two modes also added overhead which didn't exist on the Mac.  This continued even after the introduction of the Pentium.

As Apple tightly controlled both their hardware and software, there was less variation in the hardware that needed to be accounted for: drivers for Windoze (particularly the generic bundled ones) often needed to account for a wider range of possible hardware combinations (and they still do for that matter), each of which may involve the need to work around oddities in specific implementations of what are otherwise supposed to be compatible hardware designs (manufacturer drivers can help with this, but then you need to deal with bugs and inefficiencies in the drivers which may not be particularly well-maintained and which were developed by people with less inside knowledge of the OS they were being developed for...).  As Apple had (and still has) fewer combinations of hardware (busses, etc.) to deal with, this is a bit less of an issue.

 

 

On 10/5/2019 at 1:20 AM, Bill Rosmus said:

Now Apple uses the same Intel chips that Windows uses.

The CPUs and other parts of the chipsets, yes, but Apple designs their own motherboards and system architectures which they are able to optimize the OS for, while Windoze is still stuck needing to support anything and everything that companies from who-knows-where come up with before or after that version of the OS is released...  a Mac also tends to be cheaper than a Windoze system made with equivalent specs (this has been checked numerous times by people around the web - Macs are actually *cheaper* than Windoze systems of truly equal specs).

 

On 10/5/2019 at 1:20 AM, Bill Rosmus said:

Android uses plenty powerful processors on the flagship devices

This was already discussed elsewhere on the forum...  an Android device which comes close to matching an Apple device in performance generally costs roughly the same amount or more than the Apple device.  There is no cost advantage to using Android over iOS or to using Windoze over a Mac when you need a high-spec device.  Apple doesn't make low-end systems such as the more common Windoze and Android stuff that gives the illusion of them having lower prices.

 

On 10/5/2019 at 6:41 AM, ErrkaPetti said:

there are more Android devices because there aren't that many suckers out there with the kind of money required to buy Apple

Then they are using lower-powered systems as they would need to pay as much or more than they would have paid for the iPhone/iPad to get similar performance from an Android device.

 

On 10/5/2019 at 1:20 AM, Bill Rosmus said:

Serif advertises itself as the low cost alternative

Even if that were so, they still need the hardware to back up the software's ability to perform.  Serif has commented multiple times that they needed to take advantage of Metal's graphics acceleration to get the iPad versions of Photo and Designer to have acceptable performance.

While Android does generally have support for Vulkan now (which would probably be the closest equivalent to Metal on the Android devices) the consistency of any particular device supporting it in hardware (and drivers) is simply not there.  As Serif cannot reasonably restrict users to downloading the app only if their device has proper graphics acceleration, they would wind up with many complaints from users trying to use the software on a device whose drivers or even hardware simply cannot provide the required performance for the apps to run smoothly, and trying to put a note in the store that says "this may not run well (or at all) on some devices if they lack hardware acceleration of the Vulkan API" isn't going to help the majority of typical tablet users to figure out if their hardware will work well or not.  The large number of devices that would need to be tested or checked to build a compatibility list would not be practical, while with the Apple ecosystem there are only a limited number of devices to consider, and *ALL* of the recent models support hardware-accelerated Metal.

It seems to me that Serif is smart to avoid the complaints and confusion by potentially large numbers of users having spent money on software they cannot reasonably use on their under-powered or under-supported devices by simply sticking with a platform with which compatibility is widespread and simple to explain.

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1 hour ago, fde101 said:

As Serif cannot reasonably restrict users to downloading the app only if their device has proper graphics acceleration

Since the standard channel for installing and buying Android apps is Google Play, this of course can be easily done.
Ensuring device compatibility (both at OS level - version and HW) is quite common here.

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  • 3 years later...
8 hours ago, Colie B said:

hi I am affinity for windows user and I have a android table and don have space for both the tablet and laptop in my bag. Does anyone know of a publisher like app for android.

There is no equivalent Android app for Affinity Publisher or any other desktop publishing programmes.

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One workaround I've just found while using a Samsung S9+ tablet is the use of superdisplay - https://superdisplay.app/

This does need a windows laptop to connect to with affinity installed, since you're basically accessing the windows desktop via the tablet
But I've found it works really well ether via usb cable or wifi and using the samsung pen just as a mouse.

Edited by garlicbread
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