Comment by AnotherGoodName

One other thing to point out is that the entire tablet market only exists today due to re-use of the phone ecosystems. Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is. Not even Facebook makes a dedicated tablet app. It's all just the phone app ported across in a very crude way. The simple fact is that the tablet market isn't big enough to be independent of the phone ecosystem.

The CTO here proudly says he convinced the board to buy Palm and get into the tablet market but just thinking about this even lightly i'm not sure it was wrong for the CEO (and subsequently CTO) to be kicked out for this move. It's weird there's no hubris on this. A tablet market without re-use of a larger markets app ecosystem seems like poor strategic thinking to me.

Jtsummers 6 days ago

> Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is.

What apps are you using? That's not the case for any of the iPad apps I use anymore, though early on it was fairly common since quick ports could be made by checking the "release for iPad" box or however it worked back then. That was 15 years ago, though, things have changed quite a bit since then.

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Macha 6 days ago

Android has unfortunately trended the opposite direction - apps that once had tablet UIs dropped them in favour of big phone UIs as they did redesigns around 2016-2020. I dropped out of the Android tablet world in 2019 for a Windows tablet, and most recently went for an iPad this year, so maybe Android has recovered ground there, but judging by how few Android tablets are actually on the market, I wouldn't be hopeful.

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ianburrell 6 days ago

There is a difference between iPad and iPhone apps. The former run full screen, and the latter letterboxed.
I don’t use iPhone apps on this iPad Mini, they are too painful. I use the Instagram and Blue Sky web sites instead.

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- Jtsummers 6 days ago
  
  I don't use either of those services so I was unaware. So I guess there are still some apps out there without a proper iPad interface. I haven't encountered any in at least a decade though and they seem to be in the minority. Apple has gone to great lengths to make it easy to at least make something that fits on the iPad even if you don't try to make it properly native and use the screen real estate effectively. So that strikes me as laziness on the part of the Instagram and Bluesky app developers to not even try.
  
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PaulHoule 6 days ago

One could make the case that nobody needs tablet apps because web apps work well on tablets -- without annoying notifications or annoying popups to access privacy violating features [1], without adding clutter to an already too cluttered "desktop" of icons that all look the same, etc.
[1] that nobody in their right mind would click on, but I guess somebody with dementia might...

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- Jtsummers 6 days ago
  
  I don't totally disagree, though I dislike most web apps because, well, they require an internet connection too often (if not always). And I don't trust their creators to be any better at not violating privacy (my data is typically stored on their servers, after all).
  With that said, I'm not sure what you're replying to in my comment.
  
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[removed] 6 days ago

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hollerith 6 days ago

Your overall point might be correct, but some of your specifics are incorrect:

>Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is.

None of the apps I am using on my iPad have borders/sidebars.

Gmail and Youtube have long had dedicated iPad apps. DeepSeek has one (a well designed and implemented one) for interacting with its chat service. The last time I checked, Google Gemini had only an iPhone app, but I checked again today and found a full-fledged iPad app.

Even my credit union, which operates only in California and does not have any physical branches in Southern California, has a full-fledged iPad app.

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phonon 6 days ago

HP also shipped two Palm phone devices with webOS, Veer and Pre 3. They would have been more than able to create a complete mobile (and consumer electronic!) ecosystem.

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