According to a comment from Eric Schmidt, Google makes enough money from Android to pay for its development and more. Apple takes 50% of revenue from ads shown on iOS devices. On Android, Google gets to keep 100%. Google can afford to give its revenue from the Play Store (terrible name) to the wireless carriers because it's making so much more money on ads than it does on iPhone and iPad. Apple has made iOS so inhospitable for Google that it is more financially advantageous for Google to maintain Android.

The idea that Google doesn't care about revenue is an interesting theory, but totally wrong.

> Apple takes 50% of revenue from ads shown on iOS devices

Where are you getting that from? They take a 30% cut on iAd, but few apps use that; for other networks, like Google AdMob, they get nothing.

They don't pay for ads directly. They pay for Google products to be placed on the iPhone. The last estimate I saw was about 50% of total revenue. They pay 0% to place their products on an Android device.

I like how Jeff Bezos talking about hiring a team that found the engines ends up with the headline, "Jeff Bezos Discovers ..."

Based on the title, I naively assumed it had more to do with his Blue Origin company.

He paid for the effort, so I see nothing wrong with the title. "Jeff Bezos' team" is certainly more accurate.

And Steve Jobs never wrote a line of code for the iphone. So he didn't create it right?

He did not.

I don't know how they would disable that and the home button on a non-rooted phone.

The home button sends an intent that this application would just act as the default receiver for (just like the Amazon Fire tablet does for its custom homescreen), though if they are still giving access to the Market, a kid could install another launcher that responds to that intent and switch out of this app.

Yes, but the intent of Kyte Phone is to make the phone simple.

If the kid can replace the default launcher, she does not need an special UI in the first place.

(If all you want to do is micromanage your kid's life through GPS monitoring, is it possible to install a hidden GPS tracker?)

If the permission system for apps is a whitelist of installed apps the parent has approved, then installing an app from the market wouldn't necessarily allow the newly installed app to run. The new app would just show up on the device-administration page for the parent to see and decide on.

Now, if the kid uses the market to uninstall the Kyte launcher itself... then I'm guessing the stock launcher or a pop-up asking what launcher to use would come up.

Kids don't have access to the Market and parents have to explicitly white-list an application, so there's not much danger there.

I love the scattered Mac peripherals and the totally flippant attitude. Completely impartial.

Blame 60 Minutes for using the most ubiquitous web video technology instead of blaming Apple for not supporting it.

Android has dropped Flash, too, for anything beyond ICS.

So has Microsoft for the new Metro browser.

So has Adobe, for that matter, if you read between the lines (yeah, they've only "officially" dropped mobile Flash, but desktop Flash is on deathwatch).

A year from now neither any new mobile device nor the default browser on desktop Windows will have Flash.

Time to learn some new tools.

Adobe has dropped android, not the other way around.

Right, because I can't think of any reason why Apple wouldn't support Flash on a mobile device...