My comment was not meant to insult your intelligence, merely your perceived desire to have a discussion of substance.

In any event, apologies accepted. I’ve been called worse names…mostly by my wife. 🙂

Hello Ben, and Merry Christmas!

Thanks for the quick and detailed response. First of all
I’d like to say that I fully understand that my original post was abrasive and I shouldn’t have approached my concerns with the tone that I did. This conversation became much more productive when I toned it down and actually posted in a way that made sense.

I also understand where laminar research is coming from and overall I see your approach leads to a higher quality product for all platforms. I commend you for not doing a slow, lazy port in Java for the android platform and didn’t realize Google was so far behind with their C++ development tools.

In short I understand where I went wrong in my original post, and I understand why things are the way they are. I can fully accept waiting to get a decent product. And I am much better imformed now. I also want to apologize to Chris for my negativity.

The TL;DR of it all is that you guys do NOT ******* suck, you make a great sim. One that is frankly amazing. And I wish you the best of luck with your android release. I’m sure there will be lots of sleepless nights supporting that many dissimilar devices. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that mobile development is more like console development, and less like developing for the PC. Considering the scope of the project it’s amazing you can get these things working at all.

Hi Dave,

There are a few points in this comment that I can address:

1. Parity of iphone 9 on iOS and Android. You are correct that there was never equal footing of product on Android vs iOS for v9 of the mobile product. This is why we do -not- assume that iOS outselling Android 4:1 for the v9 mobile product is a function of the platform. We didn’t offer the same product.

But your assumption that the products were different due to Apple bias is incorrect. They were different because they were built at different times during a time that was both highly transitional for the app market -and- highly transitional for us because we were in the middle of building X-Plane 10 desktop, a project that took a very long time and got out of control from a project management timeframe.

With X-Plane 10 mobile I think we will be able to offer something that is the same on both platforms, or at least a lot closer, because the APIs on both platforms and their stores are both mature now. (By comparison, when we released V9M on Android, Apple had just raised the app limit to 50 MB – and it _didn’t work_ on some phones due to manufacturers modding their internal partition scheme and a an app store bug. I cannot emphasize enough how primitive things were on Android when the very first V9M product came out for it.) So we may (for the first time) get a real sense of the relative “market value” of the two platforms in an Apples-to-Apples comparison.

2. No estimated ship date. We literally -don’t have one-. I have no way to estimate how much time it will take to get the app running on a large enough percent of Android devices to ship the product. I have an estimate to an internal tech demo (e.g. Chris has the app mostly working on a Tegra tablet) but that doesn’t do us any good for shipping.

And even if we did have an estimate (with huge error bars, e.g. it will be 1-6 months), that’s totally useless for us. If we announce 1 month, then when (most likely) it takes longer everyone is pissed that we’re late. If we announce 6 months then we pre-annoy everyone (since that’s a long time). There’s no way to win when the error bars are that big.

3. Re: Google and their dev tools. Chris has already started the app port to Android, and so his comments are informed by the -current- state of development, not just past development. For example: as of this writing, you still cannot add a C++ source file to your project in Google’s IDE. Chris is very, very good at making bizarre third party SDKs work – he’s sort of an idiot savant in terms of making other people’s tech work even when it’s complex, convoluted, and requires you to make a lot of lucky guesses and psychic debugging leaps to get the tech working. Some of this unique skill set is -still- needed to make native apps work.

This may be different in a year. Chris will have a better grasp on the situation when the port is done and I hope he will write up his experience. Things are better than the V9M days (when we didn’t even have a full conformant C++ 98 or the ability to attach GDB to a process). But I still have to observe two things:
– Native development still appears to be complex and convoluted compared to native development for iOS, OSX, or Windows (desktop), and seems potentially out of reach for non-specialists.
– We’ve had a completely integrated native development and debugging experience on iOS since iOS 2.0, hence our sense of “how is this still not done on Google.”

None of these statements apply to _Java_ development on Android – our impression is that Java dev is where Google’s real focus is, particularly when we see things like full IDE support for Java and basically none for C++. But we develop a high performance native app, so that’s the part of the tool chain that applies to us, and it will also apply to any serious core 3d games.

4. Making Android users wait costs sales. This is definitely true. Making iOS users wait would cost us sales too. Chris’s blog post is an attempt to describe the relative costs of each and why we tried to minimize the down side and maximize the upside.

5. You are correct that shipping bug fixes is faster in the Google play store since there is no app review.

6. Our view of Android is -not- colored by the patent law suit; we don’t view the lawsuit as being Android specific or Google’s fault. Rather, we think the problem of patent trolling is ubiquitous and frankly equally likely to happen on iOS. (The lodsys trolling happened before the suit we were involved in.) I shouldn’t say more about this because commenting on the ongoing litigation is above my paygrade. But Austin has said plenty about the lawsuit and the patent system in general; if you read what he has said “on the record” you’ll get a pretty good view about the companies opinion and approach to patent trolling.

7. “Hire more developers”. The LR developer team has actually grown significantly over the past 5 years. And it may grow more. But I hear “hire more developers” suggested by users as a panacea for lots of things we have or haven’t done, and my response is the same:

– Read “the mythical man month”.
– Understand that scheduled times to ship on products -do not- become shorter by adding more warm bodies.

Project ship times are limited by -scope-. One way to understand this is to (as I have done) learn from the school of hard knocks: take a big project, don’t cut scope, add more warm bodies, and watch what happens. One of the main points of Chris’s post is that doing our platform ports -sequentially- was a way to limit scope and ship faster.

I actually believe that this is a case where the sum is greater than the parts: had we tried to ship both platforms at once, the larger scope of the single project would have taken LONGER to ship than doing iOS first and Android second.

8. Re: tone and “try to be more professional”, I don’t know what to tell you. You went to the comments section of the developer blog, where you have to assume the actual developers are, since we respond to comments on a regular basis, and you started your post with “as developers, you f—ing suck.” I don’t know how you can call that anything but trolling.

So there are really only two ways that it can go: you can act like an irate customer and demand that the norms of American customer service be followed (“no matter how obnoxious I am to you, you have to treat me with respect, because I paid money for your product, and the customer is always right”) or you can act like an informed developer and have an actual discussion on complex topics.

But we really can’t do both. We’re not going to run a developer blog where we have the actual developers answering questions directly -and- politely saying “yes sir, of course sir” no matter what kind of rant gets posted.

thank you for being more professional with your response than the other guy, obviously you value customers more. See my response to him. I hope my position is better understood. Chris needs to learn how to respond to criticism better.

Also Google has come very far with their dev tools, you guys make it sound like they basically don’t offer any dev tools. I thought the advances in the sdk was supposed to make porting easy. I just think your comments slight Google.

More people are adopting android devices nowadays. And we could be a stronger customer base if many of us didn’t get discouraged and give up on the app before it’s even released. So making us wait in a way costs you guys sales.

My comment about wait times for approval is because you could fix bugs quicker on android because you’d know about them faster. At least that’s what other devs say.

The patent lawsuit is what I was referring to re. Problems with version 9. Could be it has nothing to do with your attitude toward Google but that wasn’t the impression I got.

Listen, I understand your desire to keep the dev team small. But it’s high time you got some pcs to develop on and hired some expert android programmers.

I’m sorry for the tone of my initial post and I hope this more clearly expresses my opinions. But in the end I have to say your product on iOS is incredible and I do look forward to your android release. I just hope we’re talking weeks and not months. I don’t want to be downloading xplane 10 on my Android phone when iOS users are getting xplane 11. And I also hope the android product is equal in all ways to the iOS version and optimized for it, not a sloppy low resolution port.

Thanks for listening, and try to be a little more professional with your dealings with customers. You should never “not lose sleep” over the opinions of a potential source of revenue. That’s childish.

I think Chris is just leading the poster a bit – none of the ‘third OS’ contenders (WebOS, RIM, Windows Phone) have gotten enough market share to justify a third-platform port.

I’m not saying we’ll -never- do one – just that it’s not competitive with our top priorities.

Despite that fact that you’re clearly just trolling for attention, I’ll take the bait and feed you and address all of your statements. I won’t hold my breath in believing that I’ll actually having an intelligent discussion with you however.

1) “You f–ing suck” – *yawn*
2) “Flying development studios got their multiplayer update out” – What’s your point? That they did something for Android before iOS? You’re right! We could do the same. We choose not to. The blog article makes that pretty clear I thought.
3) “You’re in love with Apple” – No, I love my family. Apple’s a company that makes products…ones that I was pretty clear I find to be more polished than many alternatives. But i use whatever is going to get the job done more efficiently. That’s got nothing to do with love. It’s a preference.
4) “Apples certification process for apps sucks” – Apple’s certification process is slower than Android’s yes. It’s not ideal. We had to wait 8 days for approval. On android we’d have had to wait none. So far, developing for iOS first cost us 8 days.
5) “You’re still butthurt about the issues you had with them” – What issues do you assume we had with them in V9 that would make us “butt hurt”? I actually find their developer support to be pretty great. I have many contacts at Google that I can use to get fast responses about technical issues. Also being an open source platform, I can answer many of the questions myself.

You see…I think you’re just trying to vilianize us because you’re probably an Infinite Flight fanboy and an Android fanboy. That’s cool with me. It’s just an app and they’re just phones. I’m not really losing much sleep over your opinions.