dailylicious!

Were there any doubt that Google would close off Android and charge license fee for partners? It seems unbelievable but apparently to gain approval from Chinese authorities over Google’s acquisition of Motorola, the company had to make such an assurance. Amazon and a number of Chinese companies had been forking Android builds to create their own mobile operating systems and in the process, cuts Google off. Surely this annoys the company and perhaps provided the reason for the concern but it seems that it would be against Google’s best interest to close off Android. Regardless, the Motorola deal ensures that Android will remain free and open for another five years which means companies like Amazon and Baidu would be free to create their own Android-based operating systems.

Wired puts forward arguments from a number of developers who say that Android apps don’t look as good as iOS apps because they have to make sure the apps don’t mess up on different screen sizes and resolutions. Despite the Android environment having a far greater flexibility and freedom to design apps, it seems that the range of device sizes forces designers to conform to the lower end of the scale whereas having a single screen size for iPhone and iPod touch makes things much easier.

Of course, with iOS apps there’s the issue of retina display on the more recent iPhone, iPod touch, and the latest iPad, but the problem there is less about overall design, more about redrawing elements because the aspect ratio remains the same compared to the older devices. This means the icons and other graphical items as well as placements don’t change, they just need to have higher resolutions.

Essentially, consistency across iOS devices and its SDK makes things easier to come up with well designed apps.

There’s a Discover tab on Twitter’s iPhone and Android apps that doesn’t seem to be all that useful other than having Twitter’s search built in to it. In fact, it’s unclear what the tab is meant  for in the first place. In it is a list of news or stories that nobody in your following list links to and are not relevant to your interest at all. It’s almost like Twitter is trying to push any random news to you.

Today’s update is meant to address that somehow by adding the Activity stream into the Discover tab to show what people you follow are doing. This feature was removed from the website when Twitter introduced the new approach but it seems that Twitter may have a reason to have it after all.

Still, the Discover tab seems to remain a catch-all dumpster to shove anything that doesn’t fit in the other tabs.

That snippet from last week about the negative relationship between in-app advertising and battery life? That doesn’t seem to be a myth or propaganda against Android as Angry Birds maker Rovio also discovered the same correlation. It has worked with Nokia Siemens Network to try and optimize power usage but NSN says the ability to do that lies with the advertisement provider, in this case, companies like Google and Flurry.

Apparently Samsung had been toying with Galaxy Nexus firmware deployed in some regions which caused ICS updates to fail. The poor owners of these vendor-customized Nexus phones are victims of Samsung’s software tinkering which despite being not as significant as applying TouchWiz, changes the version number of the on-board firmware and blocking direct updates from Google. Samsung is probably working with Google to rectify this issue.

Up to 75 per cent of the energy used by free versions of Android apps is spent serving up ads or tracking and uploading user data: running just one app could drain your battery in around 90 minutes.

Astounding discovery. Doesn’t it make you want to by apps instead? Surely this applies to iOS apps as well, not just Android. The mechanism and code involved in sending data from in-app ads are similar after all.