Comment by kragen
15 days ago
Spreadsheets are a fundamentally important tool—the original "killer app" for personal computers such as cellphones, and the best way that has been found so far to put computational power in the hands of end-users. Last I checked, there was no spreadsheet in F-Droid, largely because it's a relatively small ecosystem, and most Android users still aren't using F-Droid. Instead they are subjected to the outrageously abusive apps that fill the Play Store, as described for example in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45411897. And many Android phones ship with non-uninstallable malware and shovelware. Backing up an Android phone without a Google account—indeed, even activating an Android phone without a Goolge account—is challenging. From my point of view, these are imperfections.
> Spreadsheets are a fundamentally important tool
It's nice to know that you use spreadsheets all the time.
I use them rarely, and often end up regretting that I didn't write a real program instead. And I'd definitely never see myself using one on a phone; it's too painful to type, and the screen is usually too small.
I'd guess that maybe one percent of mobile phone users have spreadsheets of any kind installed, or would want them. Maybe.
What I'm getting at here is that you seem to have a pretty skewed idea of "fundamentally important".
Admittedly an awful lot of mobile users do have a lot of game and eye candy apps that have no F-Droid counterparts. And some users have professional apps that also don't have F-Droid counterparts. But spreadsheets aren't the center of the Universe.
As I showed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413633, which I hadn't posted when you posted your comment, about 10–25% of mobile phone users have the Google Sheets app installed, because it has over a billion downloads. So it seems like your atypical personal experience is leading you into orders-of-magnitude errors.
I also use spreadsheets rarely, most recently three weeks ago, and often end up regretting it, but I do occasionally find them very valuable. I would find them even more valuable if I didn't know more powerful programming languages, which presumably is what you are alluding to with "write a real program".
I agree that cellphone screen input methods are clumsy. On the other hand, I've written probably ten thousand words of prose on this one, plus a fair bit of Python, Lua, and C, so a few spreadsheet formulas would hardly be an obstacle.
To be frank, Google Sheets came installed on my phone, don't think it's ever been opened though... Easy way to inflate numbers there.
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> Spreadsheets are a fundamentally important tool—the original "killer app" for personal computers such as cellphones
I do not agree with your supposition. Like the parent using the G1 as I did (and still have it), never used a spreadsheet app on any of my many, many phones both personal and work. I am/was a systems engineer by trade.
> Last I checked, there was no spreadsheet in F-Droid
The most popular viewer is the LibreOffice one[1], which can handle ODS and XLS (amongst many others) formats. You may have meant editing/creating which I agree they're not around. See item (1) above though.
> largely because it's a relatively small ecosystem, and most Android users still aren't using F-Droid
Or possibly, a large number of users simply do not need or use generic spreadsheet apps on their mobile devices, which is why I disagree with your opening statement as I am a direct counterexample.
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/at.tomtasche.reader/
I think they just got carried away with the term "personal computers such as cellphones". I believe they were referencing the common recognition of VisiCalc as one of the first "killer apps" for personal computers.
I'm sorry my comment was so unclear. I'll try to explain in more detail.
1. Cellphones are a kind of personal computer.
2. Numerical computation is something that computers, personal or otherwise, are very good at. Conservatively, your cellphone is ten orders of magnitude faster (ten billion times faster) than you are at tasks like averaging a set of numbers.
3. The spreadsheet user interface is expressive enough for many numerical computations† that are impractical to carry out with more limited user interfaces such as pocket calculators, but it is simple enough to understand that large masses of people can take advantage of that expressivity. (The popularity of VisiCalc on early personal computers such as the Apple ][ is one piece of evidence for this.) It is the "low-code development platform" that inspired all the current no-code and low-code platforms.
4. Such numerical computations are so commonplace in many people's lives that they do them on their cellphones, despite the small display and lack of a keyboard; one reason is that many people have cellphones as their only programmable computers. When they do such complex numerical calculations on their cellphones, they often use spreadsheets to do them.
5. Therefore, we should regard the availability of spreadsheets as a central indicator for the viability of a computer software ecosystem, even on cellphones.
I think all of these claims are obviously correct, stipulating the ones before them, except for #4. As evidence for #4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCpJ441g-Y4 shows that the Google Sheets app for Android was at the time #7 in their "productivity" category with 793000 ratings and 4.8 stars. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... says that it has been downloaded more than a billion times and has 1.27 million ratings. The fact that people exist who do not use their cellphones for spreadsheets does not constitute evidence against this claim.
What I believe is happening, to elaborate a bit more, is that F-Droid users who need numerical computation that goes beyond what calculator apps can do are mostly just using the Google Sheets app. The radical fringe of F-Droid users like me who do not have Google accounts often make do with Termux programs such as Python, LuaJIT, PARI/GP, bc, Racket, or the C compiler, even though for many purposes a spreadsheet would be much more convenient.
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† Spreadsheets are also used as simple databases, in fact more frequently than they are used for numerical calculations, but numerical calculations alone are a strong enough argument for my purposes here, and F-Droid does have a number of adequate simple database apps.
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> Backing up an Android phone without a Google account (...) is challenging
Off topic, but I think it's impossible, rather than challenging?
Unless, maybe, if you clone the phone to another physical phone?
I haven't done it successfully, but I might just be ignorant.