""Android vs iPhone: A Layman's Guide to the Smartphone Divide"" tackles the complex world of mobile technology, focusing on the two dominant forces in the industry. This accessible book explores the fundamental differences between Android and iPhone through three key areas: operating systems, hardware ecosystems, and user experience. It argues that smartphone choice goes beyond features, reflecting personal needs and preferences in our increasingly digital lives. The book guides readers through a logical progression, starting with basic concepts of mobile operating systems and hardware before delving into specific characteristics of Android and iPhone. It then examines how these differences impact real-world usage scenarios, discussing implications for privacy, productivity, and digital lifestyle. What sets this guide apart is its focus on the average user, prioritizing practical concerns over technical specifications. It incorporates case studies, expert interviews, and interdisciplinary connections to psychology and economics, grounding complex concepts in relatable contexts. By balancing informative content with accessibility, this book empowers readers to make informed decisions about their technology use. It addresses controversies objectively, encouraging readers to form opinions based on facts rather than brand loyalty. Whether you're a curious teenager or an adult seeking to navigate the smartphone landscape, this guide offers valuable insights into the Android vs iPhone divide.

The fascinating inside story of how the Android operating system came to be. In 2004, Android was two people who wanted to build camera software but couldn't get investors interested. Today, Android is a large team at Google, delivering an operating system (including camera software) to over 3 billion devices worldwide. This is the inside story, told by the people who made it happen. Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System is a first-hand chronological account of how the startup began, how the team came together, and how they all built an operating system from the kernel level to its applications and everything in between. It describes the tenuous beginnings of this ambitious project as a tiny startup, then as a small acquisition by Google that took on an industry with strong, entrenched competition. Author Chet Haase joined the Android team at Google in May 2010 and later recorded conversations with team members to preserve the early days of Android's history leading to the launch of 1.0. This engaging and accessible book captures the developers' stories in their own voices to answer the question: How did Android succeed?

Behind the bitter rivalry between Apple and Google—and how it's reshaping the way we think about technology The rise of smartphones and tablets has altered the industry of making computers. At the center of this change are Apple and Google, two companies whose philosophies, leaders, and commercial acumen have steamrolled the competition. In the age of Android and the iPad, these corporations are locked in a feud that will play out not just in the mobile marketplace but in the courts and on screens around the world. Fred Vogelstein has reported on this rivalry for more than a decade and has rare access to its major players. In Dogfight, he takes us into the offices and board rooms where company dogma translates into ruthless business; behind outsize personalities like Steve Jobs, Apple's now-lionized CEO, and Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman; and inside the deals, lawsuits, and allegations that mold the way we communicate. Apple and Google are poaching each other's employees. They bid up the price of each other's acquisitions for spite, and they forge alliances with major players like Facebook and Microsoft in pursuit of market dominance. Dogfight reads like a novel: vivid nonfiction with never-before-heard details. This is more than a story about what devices will replace our cell phones and laptops. It's about who will control the content on those devices and where that content will come from—about the future of media and the Internet in Silicon Valley, New York, and Hollywood.

While there is a lot of appreciation for backend and distributed systems challenges, there tends to be less empathy for why mobile development is hard when done at scale. This book collects challenges engineers face when building iOS and Android apps at scale, and common ways to tackle these. By scale, we mean having numbers of users in the millions and being built by large engineering teams. For mobile engineers, this book is a blueprint for modern app engineering approaches. For non-mobile engineers and managers, it is a resource with which to build empathy and appreciation for the complexity of world-class mobile engineering. The book covers iOS and Android mobile app challenges on these dimensions: Challenges due to the unique nature of mobile applications compared to the web, and to the backend. App complexity challenges. How do you deal with increasingly complicated navigation patterns? What about non-deterministic event combinations? How do you localize across several languages, and how do you scale your automated and manual tests? Challenges due to large engineering teams. The larger the mobile team, the more challenging it becomes to ensure a consistent architecture. If your company builds multiple apps, how do you balance not rewriting everything from scratch while moving at a fast pace, over waiting on "centralized" teams? Cross-platform approaches. The tooling to build mobile apps keeps changing. New languages, frameworks, and approaches that all promise to address the pain points of mobile engineering keep appearing. But which approach should you choose? Flutter, React Native, Cordova? Native apps? Reuse business logic written in Kotlin, C#, C++ or other languages? What engineering approaches do "world-class" mobile engineering teams choose in non-functional aspects like code quality, compliance, privacy, compliance, or with experimentation, performance, or app size?

Find out what Siri's got up her sleeve with this fun and friendly guide! Who couldn't use a little extra help these days? Answers, information, reminders, and all sorts of additional help are only a verbal query away with Siri, the artificial intelligence personal assistant. Siri made her debut with the iPhone 4 and is now updated for iOS 6 as well as the third-generation iPad and she is ready to assist! This easy-to-understand guide walks you through the vast array of capabilities that Siri boasts, from creating texts and e-mails from dictation to getting directions to finding a restaurant in the area. You'll discover how to check the weather, get sports scores and schedules, look up a movie review, get Facebook and Twitter updates, make dinner reservations, and much more. Explains how to finesse the perfectly worded questions for Siri in order to get the most helpful and accurate answers Details how to have Siri make phone calls for you, look up information in a dictionary or on the web, or get music Walks you through using Siri to get stock quotes or enter numbers into a calculator and get an answer Shows you how to use Siri to set reminders and alarms, take notes, get turn-by-turn driving directions, and more Just like Siri, the straightforward-but-fun Siri For Dummies is here to help you!

Learn how to make mobile native app development easier. If your team frequently works with both iOS and Android—or plans to transition from one to the other—this hands-on guide shows you how to perform the most common development tasks in each platform. Want to learn how to make network connections in iOS? Or how to work with a database in Android? This book has you covered. In the book’s first part, authors Shaun Lewis and Mike Dunn from O’Reilly’s mobile engineering group provide a list of common, platform-agnostic tasks. The second part helps you create a bare-bones app in each platform, using the techniques from part one. Common file and database operations Network communication with remote APIs Application lifecycle Custom views and components Threading and asynchronous work Unit and integration tests Configuring, building, and running an app on a device

Learn the theory behind cross-platform development, and put the theory into practice with code using the invaluable information presented in this book. With in-depth coverage of development and distribution techniques for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Android, you’ll learn the native approach to working with each of these platforms. With detailed coverage of emerging frameworks like PhoneGap and Rhomobile, you’ll learn the art of creating applications that will run across all devices. You’ll also be introduced to the code-signing process and the distribution of applications through the major application stores, including Research In Motion (BlackBerry), Apple, and Microsoft.

What the Hell are They Thinking features 100 hotly debated topics that govern your life and covers politics, popular culture, sports, and more! It is the first book from multi-award-winning The Perspective

By failing to consider those with needs different to ourselves, we are telling these people they are not welcome in our app, and therefore that technology as a whole, is not for them. This is not hyperbole—23% of people in the US with a registered disability aren't online at all, that's three times more likely than the general population. When asked why they're not online, disabled respondents say their disability prevents them or that using the internet is too hard. To help your apps combat the issue of digital exclusion, this book covers considerations and tools mobile developers, or anyone creating mobile experiences, can use to make mobile work better for those with disabilities—mental or physical—and how to create a better experience for everyone. Software is not made up of cold, unthinking algorithms. Software is a craft in the truest sense of the word, and one of the greatest tools you can have as a craftsperson is empathy for the people who will be using your app. Each one of whom is an individual with different abilities, experiences, knowledge, and circumstances. What You'll Learn Create mobile experiences that work for as many people as possible Incorporate a worldview of accessibility and customer service into your design Work with accessibility tools and techniques commonly available for developers Who This Book Is For Mobile developers working solo or as part of a team. UX designers, quality engineers, product owners, and anybody working in mobile.

Now, one book can help you master mobile app development with both market-leading platforms: Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Perfect for both students and professionals, Learning Mobile App Development is the only tutorial with complete parallel coverage of both iOS and Android. With this guide, you can master either platform, or both--and gain a deeper understanding of the issues associated with developing mobile apps. You'll develop an actual working app on both iOS and Android, mastering the entire mobile app development lifecycle, from planning through licensing and distribution. Each tutorial in this book has been carefully designed to support readers with widely varying backgrounds and has been extensively tested in live developer training courses. If you're new to iOS, you'll also find an easy, practical introduction to Objective-C, Apple's native language.