Free Software on Android

[Nadav Har'El]

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Free Software on Android":
> There is nothing to stop anyone from developing a free app for
> Android but there currently is a high cost of entry into the market,
> the price of the device. As Android devices go down in price, and

Actually, the only cost of entry into Google's market is a one time fee
of $25. I even suggested the possibility (that I have an itch to
actually go ahead and do...) that one person pays this $25 once, and
then uploads a bunch of free software from various people, using his one
market account, making it appear on the main Android market and not the
esoteric F-Droid market, and free for the free software writers.

The prices of the Android devices are low, and going down. I bought mine
for $189. That's even cheaper than the cheapest desktop computer I ever
bought (which was 1000 shekels, as I reported in this mailing list
earlier this year).

> It was that way with Linux too, device drivers only existed for
> those devices standard on a commodity PC. If someone in the Linux
> community had a different device and wanted to write a driver, they
> would, and many of them were written by amateurs (and performed
> accordingly).

I could accept that Android are new, so there are still few apps for
it. What bothers me more is that everywhere I look, I can find apps that
people *have* written, but are either for-money or free-with-ads (which
basically means they can't be open source, otherwise people can remove
the ads). E.g., I looked for a Wikipedia browsing app, and found a nice
one, but with ads, and of course not open source. What the ****??
Thousands of people spent millions of hours writing this encyclopedia without
making a penny, and this schmoe thinks he should make money by showing ads
on their efforts?

Once someone publishes a real free-software app that (in this example)
browses wikipedia, all the for-money or ad-filled applications will be
forgotten, just like dozens of "shareware" text editors have gone the
way of the dodo, but vi and emacs remain to this day.

I'm also curious, are people making real money from this market? By "real"
I mean something they can actually support themselves with, not $100 or
even $1000. By "people" I mean a significant percentage of the app
writers, not the top 1 percent successes like "Angry Birds". My guess is
that people *think* they will make money this way, which is why they do
it, but at the end most of them will make peanuts. It's like the
"shareware" phenomenon of the 1990s.

> In your case, you have the device, you can obtain the development
> kit and the market account, feel free to develop something. Maybe
> you have that right combination of abilities to produce an app that
> people want.

I already wrote a tiny widget which I needed, and I based it,
unsurprisingly, on some free software widget which I found. So the
availability of free software on Android is very important for
developers who want to learn - I just wish there were more of it.

And of course, before I can publish anything I did, I need to learn a
bit more so I won't be ashamed of my code ;-) So far I only spent around
a day on learning Android programming - but the result - of being able to
program my own Linux-based mobile device - is very satisfying.

> As for making money on Emacs and ls, well, Emacs was hardly a
> revolutionary product, it was just another text editor in a field of
> lots of text editors, that just sort of grew. There are many text
> editors available for Linux and I doubt that most Linux users don't
> use it. I know for sure that most UNIX users don't.

Most android apps aren't revolutionary as well. Like I say, I found
ad-supported Wikipedia apps (when one could just use a normal
browser...), I saw an ad-supported memory game for kids (yeah, right, my
3 year old kid can actually read those ads...), and a lot of other
mundane crap that isn't free software, but could have been. It took me a
lot of effort to find an example free-software widget that I can build on -
most of the fairly trivial widgets on the market are free, but their source
is not available.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                 Wednesday, Dec 28 2011, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Tact: The ability to describe others as
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |they see themselves. - Abraham Lincoln