I must admit....... [I never gave iPhone a fair chance]

[daneoni]

Hmm I found text editing on n4 to be much easier. There was no chronic input lag either so I never found it "bad".

It wasn't so much lag but rather the random jumping around of the cursor when manipulating large blocks of text...at least in my experience.

 

[LIVEFRMNYC]

70% of users are not using galaxy s 3/4, Htc one/one x/one s.

Majority of that marketshare is actually low to midrange handsets. Optimizing a good game for all of them is a nightmare.

Optimizing the same for just one target (iOS) as iPhones are not as wildly different apart from mild processor and memory bumps, is much easier.

Also every one who buys an iPhone can run it. 4/4s/5 (even 3gs ran 2012 3D games, not sure about the new ones, i suspect it can't now) are pretty solid in that department.

Just put yourself in a developer's shoes and then see. A developer is also targeting the return on his investment which seems to be better on iOS.

The low to midrange handsets are decreasing at a rapid rate. Doubt most manufacturers would produce them much longer.

 

[sentinelsx]

It wasn't so much lag but rather the random jumping around of the cursor when manipulating large blocks of text...at least in my experience.

That can be an issue for sure. The magnifying glass of iOS does make this much easier to manipulate. Unfortunately it seems to be under a patent (an educational guess) so i doubt google will be able to implement it

 

[tjl3]

The low to midrange handsets are decreasing at a rapid rate. Doubt most manufacturers would produce them much longer.

According to this post, I could not find any documentation where it explicitly reports the screen sizes per each category, you could conclude that the low to mid range smartphone market is not going anywhere anytime soon (another way of saying it is less than 6% of the Android smartphone market is high end Android devices):

Screen size - market share
--------------------------------
Small (2"-3.5") - 9.5%
Normal (3.5"-4.3") - 79.9%
Large (4.3"-7") - 5.7%
XLarge (greater than 7") - 4.9%

Source: http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html (as of April 24,2013)

And there was an article on the front page of MR that showed room for growth in the mid range market. But I think there is growth to be sought in the low end too. Because the low end is the easiest entry to market, it still has tons of growth b/c there is a good deal of people still using only dumbphones. This group is more likely to enter the market on the low end than to reach for the high end market.

And while these smartphones dominate the market, most of them are running w/ dual core processors, underpowered GPUs, small batteries, and lower PPI screens. Obviously, not every utility or app is going to require the latest and greatest. But Android dominating the smartphone marketshare is not the whole story for choosing a platform to develop in.

 

[LIVEFRMNYC]

Sony and HTC have already stated they will no longer create lower end phones.

 

[tjl3]

Sony and HTC have already stated they will no longer create lower end phones.

I guess it depends on what we consider 'low end phones.' True neither company (not sure for Sony) are releasing low cost phones. But both companies continue to release low spec'd phones. And Samsung + Motorola will continue to produce for this segment.

 

[ReanimationN]

-Text Editing. Lets just say i frequently considered bashing my phone against a wall plenty of times.

It wasn't so much lag but rather the random jumping around of the cursor when manipulating large blocks of text...at least in my experience.

Yes! Why is this not mentioned more often? The Android method of text editing is abysmal. Those caliper things are horrible to try and get to where you want them to be, mine would always go spastic and jump all over the screen, then jump back to where I started selecting text, then back to some random position- it's a nightmare. The pointer thing that is used to select the text insertion position is also annoying to move around compared to iOS' magnifying glass.

 

[daneoni]

Yes! Why is this not mentioned more often? The Android method of text editing is abysmal. Those caliper things are horrible to try and get to where you want them to be, mine would always go spastic and jump all over the screen, then jump back to where I started selecting text, then back to some random position- it's a nightmare. The pointer thing that is used to select the text insertion position is also annoying to move around compared to iOS' magnifying glass.

Exactly.

That can be an issue for sure. The magnifying glass of iOS does make this much easier to manipulate. Unfortunately it seems to be under a patent (an educational guess) so i doubt google will be able to implement it

Yup its a shame. Would've loved to have it (or similar) implemented.