Love Zotero. I've found it to be the best document manager of the available options. Good for research organization, casual reading, highlighting, annotations, and so on.
Just want to thank the devs for sharing it with the world :)
It's funny how on the desktop, Windows has more apps and developers generally target it before MacOS. On mobile, it's the opposite where developers make apps for iOS first and release the Android version months/years later, even though Android has a 70% marketshare in mobile.
Android may have 70% device market share, but iOS has close to 70% of app store revenue market share. This is because iDevice ownership correlates with higher spending on apps. In other words, publishing an iOS app is more profitable than publishing an Android app.
Even for free apps, if they are associated with an optional payed service (like Zotero Storage), it can make economical sense to publish an iOS app first.
It all comes back to revenue: Android has twice the market share but users are about as third as likely to pay for apps / in-app purchases so the market is a lot more even than it might seem. I don’t think that’s because android users are significantly more inclined towards piracy but rather that there are really two groups, and the ones who bought the cheapest phone they could find contribute market share only for free apps.
I wonder if that’s a self fulfilling prophecy. They expect android users to pay less therefore there tends to be a worse experience ( ads or no app at all) therefore android users are conditioned that apps are worthless.
It might have something to do with side loading making piracy easier but I really think it’s as simple as there being distinct groups within the Android community. I would be surprised if the figures for app spending weren’t pretty similar if you compare people who spent roughly the same amount on their phones.
> and the ones who bought the cheapest phone they could find contribute market share only for free apps.
This can't really be true; it would imply that the actual value of all phone apps is zero, and the only reason people pay for them is that they need to get rid of some cash.
A more compelling argument might propose that the paid or expensive apps are simply not appealing enough to those whose primary factor when selecting a phone is price.
A very smart man a while back proposed that any given thing has two kinds of value: use value and exchange value. One does not necessarily overlap with the other, yet both can totally capture a things "value" depending on where you start.
If something has value of its own, then it will be purchased regardless of whether other unrelated products are or aren't purchased.
Thus, in order for people who don't find iPhones particularly valuable to contribute zero market share to the independent market for phone software, it can only be the case that phone software has no value.
It will only be purchase by people who can afford it and who find it worth the price. If someone doesn’t purchase it, there is no implication that they see zero value in it.
It’s just that people who don’t have money don’t spend it. If you have a ton of senior citizens getting lifeline phones, it doesn’t tell you much about the spending habits of Android users who aren’t on fixed incomes.
> It's funny how on the desktop, Windows has more apps and developers generally target it before MacOS.
I would say this is true for certain types of apps. Games, indisputably are Windows-first (and no matter what the Apple Game Porting Toolkit offers, without Apple going full Valve, this will remain the case), and certain business applications (AutoCAD, some medical stuff, other highly-specific and niche engineering apps, internal LOB apps for corporate clients environments) are either Windows-only or best on Windows, but I would argue that since at least 2005 or 2006, the amount of good software that is Mac-first or Mac-only is significantly higher than any other platform.
Obviously, in 2024, the web is the main application platform. The web won. But despite having a smaller market share (and today the market share is higher than any other time), there has long been a disproportionate ratio of good software on Mac versus other platforms.
Yes and no. The Android Market was only a few months behind the App Store (paid apps took another year) but when Android started to take off, lots and lots of developers started to try to come to Android in a big way and some even experimented with being Android first. But they all largely failed. Companies that actively invested in trying to be Android-first for a paid app have largely failed or been relegated to a very specific niche.
First, I think it was because the tooling was so much worse for Android than iOS, especially in the early years. And Google didn’t bother enforcing or even really outlining any HIGs for the longest time. It didn’t help that every Android maker had its own skin for the longest time (that is mostly over now, except for Samsung and some Chinese phone makers — and I would argue Samsung has a distinctive brand now that people buy their phones for their interface. They don’t want stock Android, they want the Galaxy Android experience).
But then even when you did have hit phones, like the first Motorola Droid and the Samsung Galaxy S (where the Galaxy S3 was a huge moment) and better dev tools, you still didn’t have users willing to pay for apps or even IAP. And it is hard to justify heavy-investment into a platform that people won’t pay for if your primary business is selling an app.
It also helps that iOS users typically have devices that are updated more regularly and that iOS devices are supported longer. And or course, there are fewer devices to test (though far more than there used to be).
Add to that, there’s a huge variance in device hardware, form factors, OS versions and API support for Android. As well as poorer UI APIs and harder to integrate C code (important to sharing cross platform libs).
The ROI on delivering a *good* experience for Android users is really low.
This is an old trope that's not nearly as relevant as you seem to imply. It is also the same problem Apple would have with laptop and desktops, but is really not an issue.
I, personally, believe that the platform has very little to do with that disparity of revenue at this point - but it is directly related to the demographic purchasing the phone. Android phones are often much easier to acquire with fewer financial resources. That is not the market Apple has targeted or has wanted to cater to in their quest to position themselves as a more premium brand. In some cases they may be and in others it is a marketing facade that people have bought into.
But, the reality is to deliver a good experience on Android isn't any harder than that same experience on Apple. Is it as financially rewarding? Probably not, again due to the difference in overall demographic of users. But I think it has very little to do with technical limitations or variances as described.
Just look at how apps are handled by the variety of folding Android phones today or devices with unusual aspect ratios. You get clipping and stretching in a lot of cases, even as recently as the latest Pixel Fold
iOS has much better UI libraries than Android. They also have a better constraint and relative positioning system that allows for UI to adapt to changes in screen ratios.
And none of that even addresses the disparity of Android versions in use. Yes, Google Play and Jetpack help paper over some of that, but good luck if you need to use a non-Google Play device or need to deal with some of the APIs that just don’t get shimmed. Or if you’re using graphics APIs and need to deal with the vendor and OS specific deviances in Vulkan implementation.
I very much disagree with your dismissal of it as a dated trope. As a game and app dev, targeting Android is incredibly annoying even today and results in targeting the most popular models in a demographic and hoping things scale outwards.
I didn't say "irrelevant" - and I do agree with parts of your statement. As I said, it's not nearly as relevant to the context of the argument. The argument being that it's hard to deliver ROI (look at the grandparent comment) on Android because of technical limitations.
And, as I said, I "personally" believe this to be true. Android was much harder to develop for previously. It's a lot better. And I do see some of the same problems in the IOS ecosystem when I try to run apps clearly written for iPhone form factors on iPad.
But, my argument was stating that ROI was not really tied to the technical limitations (again I personally believe this to be true, being a mostly Android user) as stated and more on the demographic of user.
TL;DR
I, personally, don't believe that technical limitations create ROI disparity between IOS and Android store revenue.
Out of curiosity what is it? Neither the store link or this one seem to explain. Is it some kind of citations tracking system? A pdf editor? I'm not sure what the features add up to in total.
It's mostly a tool to manage research literature. It allows you to add works you are viewing in your web browser to collections. Then, you can create bibliographies from these collections. As a researcher I use it a lot, since it makes working with references much smoother. There's also extra features like cloud syncing and most recently an integrated PDF viewer and annotator. https://www.zotero.org/
It's most commonly used by academics for automatically extracting citation metadata from journal article pages from JSTOR, Springer, Elsevier etc. in a structured format (instead of having to enter them manually) and saving them to a local library. Also automatically saves the PDF locally if you have access to it.
It also has a Word add-on that allows you to insert citations as dynamic Word "fields" linked to items in your Zotero Library, so citations can be automatically kept in sync with your Zotero Library and can be easily converted to different formatting styles.
Yeah, fundamentally it helps you manage records of documents. Of course you can also attach PDFs and full text (if you have them), but it's the record that's important.
A common use case is in academia - it helps you track your citations and then output standardised reference lists, which is a pain to do by hand.
Other tools in this space are Mendeley and Endnote.
Expecting(hoping?) software you run on your hardware to be libre shouldn’t be dependent on your abilities to develop and publish software , open source or otherwise.
Not everyone, even in this forum is a software developer, and out of those who are - most work for an organization therefore don’t own what they develop and have limited influence to choose licensing of their work product.
At best we can perhaps maybe point out someone’s hypocrisy if they already develop software who’s licensing is under their control(I.e. not paid for by someone) and is also closed source and at the same time demand for open source from others . Even then I don’t think it is a good sentiment to have .
It's not hypocritical for someone who's never published any software to say that. It'd only be hypocritical for someone who's published non-open-source software to.
Just took it for a spin. Interface looks decent. I love that I'm able to invert colors aka PDF dark mode cheat.
But I don't seem to be able to add annotations to a PDF and sync that back to my desktop, which is a bummer. I'm sure that will work in the future, and then I will finally be able to read and annotate papers on a tablet.
Okular set a high bar for what a good PDF Reader can do, this is surprisingly decent. The one killer feature which I don't anticipate any other software to implement any time soon is the "trim margins" feature of Okular, which makes pdfs so much more readable. For some.of those journals, the margins are like 30% of the width, that's some serious screen read estate, and the text is often too small already with academic papers.
Well, for now I can't even figure out where Zotero stores the PDF locally on Android... Wish there was a button to open the PDF externally. I appreciate that there is a built in reader though.
Oooh, I wanted this but didn't think it would happen. And now it's here, around the same time that we can finally use their extension on Firefox for Android, too.
I use zoo for zotero on my e-ink android tablet (Boox Tab X). It lacks quite a few zotero features but works well for my workflow—I manage my library on my desktop (downloading papers, adding tags, etc.), then sync to my Tab X where I can read and mark up the pdfs and sync them back to my desktop. It’s a great paper reading experience.
> Anyone have experience of using an iPad mini for this. Is the form factor do-able or really too small?
I contemplated doing that, but went with an iPad Pro instead (11’’, second hand). Even 11’’ felt a bit small and I got a 13’’ eventually. Besides screen size, the Apple Pencil 2 is miles better.
> I like that I could read lying down with one hand, which I can’t achieve with a full-sized iPad.
Yes, for reading a Mini would be much better. More Kindle-like. The 11’’ Pro is still manageable with one hand (but without a case), but it’s not comfortable.
The iOS version uses PDFkit, so the options for viewing and annotation are much better. It drives me bonkers that I can’t do single-page view on the desktop app.
Great to see this, even though the functionality is currently pretty limited. PDF download doesn't seem to work currently, even if the PDF is available via e.g. arxiv. Going to keep an eye on the development.
If I mostly want to keep my own document repository (pdf, word, etc) with search ability over all included documents and, maybe, the ability to do notations, is this the right tool? If not, any suggestions?
Yes, this can be used as a document manager for those purposes, with selected plugins (which ones are based on preference; the list is not too long [1]). It now has the ability open and annotate PDFs, although for a long time it did not. There are additional notetaking plugins.
It doesn't have all the features of traditional document managers, but it will be far better for handling annotations.
I don't know much about JabRef itself, but a quick search seems to indicate that one of the key differences is word document integration - JabRef is focused on bibtex.
Oh nice Christmas present. I am using devonthink at the moment but would love to have a look at something else how does zotero hold up with big libraries?
Very well I would say (20gb and counting).
More importantly: Zotero is the only one that does Web scraping correctly. If you are looking at a paywalled article, it will capture your DOM from the browser, so you get what you are looking at. DevonThink and many others choke at paywalled content because they try to access the content independently.
Last but not least: thanks to the developers for the latest updates that bring zotero to a more modern experience. The iOS app specifically is awesome!
You can use them both together! Just have Zotero save your PDFs to a directory that DEVONthink will index. That way, you can use the right tool for the job. For inserting citation into documents, the work processor plug-ins that Zotero offers are really fantastic. Similarly, for academic papers, the web clipper that Zotero has is much better suited to those particular types of documents than the more general purpose one included with DEVONthink.
The only server functionality I'm aware of is syncing between devices. Zotero does offer hosting space for this, but you can host your own as well. It works with Webdav, so I have used my own hosted instance of Nextcloud for syncing.
Zotero is an offline software with syncing capability. They charge for extra storage beyond 200MB, which is their only streams of revenue, you can setup a WebDAV server and point Zotero there
For the attachments like pdf you can use webdav, but for the metadata you have to use their service [1]. They have the code repos online so it's open source, but no self-hosting instructions [2]. They claimed it to be due to technical difficulties [3], though imo they have no incentives to provide this given that they host a paid service themselves.
I've installed the app linked in TFA and it immediately asked me to sign in or sign up without any option to configure my own server address. But since it's still a beta version, the custom server/local only options are probably not implemented yet.
Although this would be useful. Students currently using Chromebooks can still use it. Install connector(extension) from Chrome app store and choose save to library (online zotero library) instead. It is annoying that you will need to do that with every addition to the library but this will work.
Just want to thank the devs for sharing it with the world :)