Comment by kragen
15 days ago
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.
I think this just fundamentally does not track, because the vast, vast majority of phone users are not regularly using a spreadsheet app.
When we imagine phone applications, we think messaging, social media, web browsing, and email. That's 99% of stuff people do on their phone.
The statistic of "how many people have this app installed" is fundamentally flawed. Why? Most apps are worthless. Throwaways, single purpose.
Its entirely possible, and dare I say extremely likely, that people install (or it came installed!) Google sheets for one document that was shared one time, then forgot about it.
It seems improbable to me that photography, video recording, video games, phone calls, digital payments, video calls, tethering, and charging the battery would all be outside of that 99%. Possibly you don't know very much about how the vast, vast majority of phone users use their phones, for example because your friends and family aren't typical of Indonesians, Nigerians, Indians, and Chinese people.
Or because you aren't especially interested in whether what you're saying is true or false, since it is—to me at least—obviously wrong. And you're surely somewhat aware of how atypical your circle of friends is among, for example, either Malaysians or Texans, and probably both.
None of those are spreadsheets... And a lot of those are built into the phone. Like phone calls, digital payments, video, photography.
I just think using spreadsheets as a measure of an application repository for phones is obviously stupid.
Please bear in mind that things like the playstore aren't android phone stores. They're Android stores. Meaning, they also target tablets and chromebooks.
Now, I'm sure Google sheets on an android tablet is perfectly mediocre. But I can assure you, on a phone, it is downright painful.