There are a number of reasons developers develop for iOS first, or avoid Android completely. Perhaps the top two reasons are OS fragmentation and device fragmentation, both of which drive up the development costs (more use cases to build for, more use cases to test for).

This post from GigaOM makes the case that Google has solved these problems, at least in part. The key is Google’s Play Services.

Play Services, introduced in 2012, is effectively a background download of core services required to run apps on Android. Putting the OS install numbers to one side for a moment, this is the stat that matters to developers – over 93 percent of all Android users are running the latest version of Google Play Services.

More importantly, Google has been slowly moving core Android features, APIs and app elements out of the OS and into Google Play Services — meaning developers can ensure their apps run smoothly (with all the new features they plan to implement) across all devices carrying the latest infrastructure.

This is a very clever solution, and an important step in the right direction for Android. The key here is the widespread availability of Play Services. Play Services will run on Gingerbread (Android 2.3.3-2.3.7) and beyond, which covers the vast majority of Android devices. To get a sense of how big an improvement this is, check out the Android OS adoption numbers, which are regularly updated by Google.

Even with this solution, I still remain bearish on Android development, simply due to the overwhelming testing problem. There are just too many types of Android devices out there, and too many of them have forked versions of Android. That particular toothpaste is out of the tube and it’s going to take more than Play Services to clean up this mess.

TUAW:

Why would anyone need another maps app when they already have Apple and Google Maps? The main reason is that both Apple and Google map apps need an internet connection. Yes, some map data can be cached, but all of your points of interest need the internet in order to appear.Not so with Maps.Me. Once you load the app, you can download maps for anywhere (including hundreds of points of interest for any corner of the world) while you have an internet connection. When you get to your destination, everything is on your iOS device so you won’t be burning up those precious megabytes.

I can’t find my butt with a map and a flashlight so I always appreciate any app that can help. And for us Canadians who travel and get dinged with ridiculous roaming charges, anything that helps us use our iPhones offline while traveling is welcome.

Macworld:

As I positioned the phone vertically, the boat rocked a bit from a small wave, and—you guessed it—the phone slipped out of my hands.

I watched my iPhone fall, land on the back of the boat, then sickeningly slide off the boat and splash into the water.

Not everyone is so lucky but the story of the near-death and complete resurrection of this iPhone is interesting.

The Blueprint is an online retail site for the next wave of connected devices and wearables. Check out the Blueprint today to discover beautifully designed products like Drop — the iPad connected kitchen scale. Drop is a smart scale that makes perfect baking easy with interactive recipes, smart substitutions, recipe rescaling, and more. Say goodbye to #BakingFail forever. With Drop, you’re on your way to creating one perfectly yummy masterpiece after another.

Pre-order Drop today for 20% off retail.

Jim Yurchenco was just beginning his incredible design career when he was asked to design a mouse for a revolutionary new computer Apple was working on, the Lisa.

Yurchenco started looking at other input devices to see how it could all be done more elegantly. He found his answer in an Atari arcade machine. Its trackball seemed perfect for the job.

The Atari machine differed from the Xerox mouse in a few key ways. For one, its trackball wasn’t forced up or down. Instead, it just floated. Yurchenco tried doing the same and found the mouse functioned just fine if you let gravity do the work. Moreover, it resulted in less friction and fewer parts. That was one key insight. The Atari machine also used optics to track the trackball’s movement, relying on interrupted beams of light instead of mechanical switches. By borrowing this concept, Yurchenco further streamlined the internal components. That was insight number two.

The third insight came in how you use the thing. At first, Yurchenco remembers, everyone assumed mice had to be phenomenally accurate to deliver a good experience. “Suddenly we realized, you don’t care if it’s accurate!” he recalls. People don’t pay attention to what their hand is doing when they use a mouse; they just care about where the cursor goes. “It’s like driving a car. You don’t look at where you’re turning the steering wheel, you turn the steering wheel until the car goes where you want.”

Terrific read. While you are at it, spend a few minutes with Jim Yurchenco’s design philosophy in the video embedded below.

Some great selfies, some more dangerous than others, but thrilling nonetheless.

Maybe it’s because I just came across the 10,000th social media selfie I’ve seen this month that’s making me snap. It was another of those inane pics taken in the safe confines of a bar that looks like every other, so I burned the morning looking for more dangerously-shot selfies. In particular the famous ones I’d seen those Russian maniacs shooting high up in the Dubai sky.

Jean-Louis Gassée takes us on a walk through the history and creaky evolution of the tablet, then explores the future of the desktop and tablet lines.

If we consider that Mac unit sales grew 18% last quarter (year-to-year), the company’s game becomes clear: The sweet spot on Apple’s racket is the set of customers who, like Tim Cook, use MacBooks and iPads. It’s by no means the broadest segment, just the most profitable one. Naysayers will continue to contend that the prices of competing tablets are preordained to crash and will bring ruin to Apple’s Affordable Luxury product strategy…just as they predicted netbooks would inflict damage on MacBooks.

As always, Gassée is a seasoned voice of experience and an enjoyable and educational read.

Ad Week:

The spot, created by TBWA\Media Arts Lab and directed by Lance Acord of Park Pictures, shows a teen at Christmas who seems anti-socially glued to his iPhone, though it turns out it’s for heartwarming reasons. It beat out four other nominees for the prize. Two of them were Super Bowl ads by Anomaly for Budweiser—”Hero’s Welcome” and “Puppy Love.” The other two were BBDO’s “Childlike Imagination” for GE and Wieden + Kennedy’s “Possibilities” for Nike.

The commercial took three days to shoot and was filmed in a historic house located on the edge of the River Valley in snowy Edmonton. Beautifully done.

This is a tricky piece of news.

Nintendo Co. (7974) jumped in Tokyo trading after its new Mario Kart 8 video game surpassed 1 million units in U.S. sales and affiliate The Pokemon Co. said an online trading-card game will be released as an application for Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPad.

The Pokémon game is owned by The Pokémon Company, which is affiliated with Nintendo (Nintendo has certain licensing and marketing rights) but not owned by Nintendo.

“We have been here many times before in regards to Nintendo’s tentative plans to introduce some of its characters for smart devices,” Amir Anvarzadeh, a manager of Japanese equity sales at BGC Partners Inc. in Singapore, said by e-mail. “This latest Pokemon cards plan which is already out on PCs is hardly a change in its direction.”

This is not quite correct. Since there is currently no Nintendo affiliated game on the iPad, this is a “sticking their toes in the water” moment for Nintendo. Pokémon is a huge property, certainly one of the largest electronic gaming properties in the world. Pokémon on iPad is a big step for The Pokémon Company and for Apple, and I would think the sales numbers will be an important source of sales intel for future Nintendo projects.

Vice:

How do we try to change whatever it was that brought someone into trouble with the law? And if that proves impossible, what is the best way that society can protect itself? I wanted to find out. I also wanted to see how much of what I knew—or thought I knew—about jail turned out to be true. So I wrote to corrections departments worldwide asking for access.

I discovered that I could go to jail in America as an “undercover voluntary detainee.”

I don’t know if the author is brave or stupid. Undoubtedly, a lot of both.

Anxious Machine:

I decided to do just that, purchasing and trying out Instacast, Downcast, Pocketcasts, Podwrangler, Castro, Mocast, and Overcast. I made comparison video to share what I observed.

I have no background in design, but perhaps because I have a degree in comparative literature, I find it endlessly fascinating to compare the interface of apps and savor the details of what each one offers. None of these apps is perfect, but it’s inspiring to see how a group of talented humans use their skills in different ways, through the endlessly plastic medium of software, to approach the same problems.

Good round up and comparison of what’s available.

The Verge:

I consider “tourist” to be the filthiest of words. It’s the curse I grumble when caught behind pedestrians walking without purpose on big-city sidewalks. But I differentiate between explorer and tourist: the former being someone that travels to an unfamiliar place to learn about it, the latter a barbaric asshat driven by the desire to document his very existence.

Funny article that makes some great points about how far too many people “record without being present”.

Ashley Durance:

“The thing about the East Coast is it’s so beautifully Canadian.”

The Publisher and I were lucky enough to have been born in Nova Scotia, Canada. He is lucky enough to still live there. Even though I’ve been gone for 25 plus years, I still think of Nova Scotia my home. This photo series captures some of the beauty of it.

There are some great tips in here.

Elizabeth Holmes is only 30 years old, but has a lifetime of success. Back in 2003, Holmes was a sophomore at Stanford University and envisioned a process of performing blood tests with a device that required much less blood (just a drop) than existing blood tests (normally requiring a vial or two of blood).

Fast forward to today, and she’s a billionaire, running Theranos. Her goal is to change the world. She wears black, and operates her company in super stealth mode, jealously guarding her company’s secrets.

This is a fascinating story, one that reminds me in many ways of Steve Jobs and Apple.

SmartThings started as a KickStarter in 2012. Astonishing.

Right around the closing rounds of last month’s World Cup matches, armed robbers raided a Samsung electronics factory in Brazil, subduing workers and guards before making off with about US$6.3m worth of mobile phones and computers.

Turns out, part of that booty has surfaced in Paraguay, about 1,000 km due west. Here’s a Google Translate version of the story [Hat tip to Marcus Mendes].

Last week, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh rejected the US$324.5 million Apple, Google recruiting lawsuit settlement. This week, Apple shareholder R. Andre Klein sued the Steve Jobs’ estate, along with Tim Cook and others, claiming Apple “misled investors and damaged the value of the company”.

The case was filed by shareholder R Andre Klein on behalf of all Apple shareholders.

In the papers, he criticised Jobs’ “zealous pursuit of profits”.

“Jobs’s conduct is a reminder that even widely respected businessmen can knowingly commit unlawful acts in the zealous pursuit of profits.

“In this case, Jobs and the other individual defendants knowingly caused Apple to enter into agreements that violated California law and US antitrust laws.”

The Verge:

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook is the latest notable person to undertake the Ice Bucket Challenge, and doused himself with icy water in the name of charity at a company event earlier today. The challenge was created to raise money for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. So far, numerous celebrities and tech personalities have undertaken the challenge, including Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller, who posted a shots of himself getting doused on a beach today.

“Under the rules you also get to call out others who have to do the challenge themselves, or face social shame.” Really? Do you really think these kinds of powerful people can be peer pressured into doing things?

Some people are sick bastards.

Behold, Hanx Writer, created by Tom Hanks. Hanx Writer recreates the experience of a manual typewriter, but with the ease and speed of an iPad.

I must admit, this is a pretty cool app. It’s great when someone can take a passion, like a typewriter, and create an app. The @AppStore will have a live chat with Hanks this morning at 9 am PT.

The network effect is the idea that the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it. If you are breaking ground on a new business area that depends on the network effect, this anecdote offers some terrific insight.

The anecdote goes this like: One telephone has no value. Two telephones have a wee bit of value. After 100 phones, you may know someone with a phone, and if so, then there is value in you signing up for telephone service. After 100,000 phones, you very likely know many people with phones. And at 1,000,000 phones, many of your friends, colleagues, and family will have phones, making the service highly valuable.

Interesting read, especially if you’ve got a bit of the entrepreneur in you.

Here’s one for Gruber’s Claim Chowder file. Pandora CFO Mike Herring, speaking with Oppenheimer Securities analyst Jason Helfstein at an investment conference:

I don’t have much comment on Beats. Frankly, it’s not a competitive service in any form today. iTunes Radio is much more of it, competitive service and really had no impact on us long-term. If we do our job well, they’ll continue to provide the best service possible, I think Apple has been a really important partner to us in a lot of ways, we don’t see that changing any time soon. So only time will tell but we feel really confident in our position.

Time will tell on this one. Certainly Beats in its current form is not a directly competing service, but I would definitely not bet against Jimmy Iovine (with his incredible music industry contacts) and Apple (with the iTunes ecosystem and a massive war chest in place).

The Daily Beast:

For years, one man has approved virtually every beer label design in the United States. Among brewers, he’s a tyrant. A legend.

A pedantic pain in the ass.

Brewers and legal experts speak of him in hushed tones, with equal parts irritation and reverence.

And he goes by the name “Battle.”

I’d never thought of the fact that someone would have to approve beer labels.

The Globe and Mail:

Sugars are themselves toxins, some researchers suggest, that cause obesity, diabetes, hyper- tension and Alzheimer’s disease. Sugar has joined salt and fat on the list of dietary evils. Governments and health experts are urging people to cut back their daily intake.

How did we get ourselves into this unhappy state?

It’s a shame something so many of us love and crave is potentially so deadly.

Connectedly:

One of the easiest ways for to jump into the connected home space is with some awesome connected lighting. Smart lights are simply bulbs (and usually a bridge or hub) that replaces your standard light bulbs and offer more functionality — namely being able to control them from your smartphone or tablet. These Wi-Fi bulbs are typically more expensive than standard bulbs, but last just as long (if not longer), plus they go above and beyond just keeping you out of the dark.

If I was a home owner, I’d probably investigate these (and other) kinds of lighting systems. Do any of you use/recommend any particular system you use in your own home?