Android FTW

by sant0sk1 • 18 years ago

32 49 18 years ago

sanj• 18 years ago

This argument undervalues just how much carriers can undermine the experience.

Part of the success of the iPhone is that his Steve-i-ness managed to wrangle concessions out of AT&T that make the iPhone work well. I'd be surprised if something as simple as "Visual Voicemail" will exist anytime soon on Android 'in the wild'.

Apple's strength is in an excellent end-to-end experience. Until Android can come close to matching this, I think the iPhone will continue to rule.

Unfortunately (for Android), this isn't about technology. It is about having leverage over carriers. And I think that's where the iPhone will continue to win.

yawn2• 18 years ago

It's pretty obvious that he's new to mobile development. The first thing to understand is that the carriers completely control the playing field. It's incredibly frustrating trying to write an app across multiple devices let alone multiple carriers. Hardware on one device may be very easy to work with on one carrier, yet a complete pain in the rear on another carrier. They just have to get their hands on things and make adjustments.

Certification is also way more painful than it needs to be on some carriers. Access to some portions of the APIs are blocked by the carriers unless certified by the carrier. The certification process can be very painful if you do not have elevated status inside the carrier.

We have had problems getting GPS to work reliably on a specific popular line of smart phones with a specific carrier. The GPS on the same devices works perfectly on other carriers. This kind of stuff happens at all levels of the API.

Welcome to mobile development.

mattmaroon10• 18 years ago

I don't pretend to know much about mobile development, and I've heard much the same about carrier certification. That's exactly why I think Android will do well.

"Google Developer Advocate Jason Chen told the Android breakout session that developers won't need to get Android applications certified by anyone nor will there be any hidden APIs accessible only to handset makers or mobile operators."

from: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/android_is_out_for_ipho...

Has that since been proven incorrect and I just didn't hear about it? That's possible, and if so I think it will be significantly less appealing to developers.

mattmaroon10• 18 years ago

Ha, it's definitely not an excellent experience end-to-end according to the friends who've bought iPhones, especially 3g. The first end involved lines at the Apple store, bricked phones, arcane activation procedures.

ashu2• 18 years ago

Most of that involved over excited early adopters. This is a bad strawman. Most folks over the last year (for 2g) did not experience any of this at all.

elai• 18 years ago

That is so true. When the iPhone came finally out in Canada, the experience was ruined by roger's horrible contracts & conditions.

menloparkbum• 18 years ago

The argument is also too optimistic about the number of phones that will be produced and what networks they will be allowed to operate on.

Contrary to what Google's marketing materials would have you believe, neither the handset manufacturers nor the carriers want to get deeply in bed with Google. In fact, they distrust Google already because of their involvement in the 700Mhz spectrum auction. The carriers all know that what google REALLY wants is to own their own wimax network so they can bypass the carriers altogether. Ultimately, this might be great for consumers but for the near-term Google will have to cooperate with the carriers if they want anyone to actually use the Android phones.

Regarding handsets, the only major phone manu interested in Android is Samsung. Nokia, with 40% of the market, doesn't give a shit about Android. Neither does Motorola or Sony Ericsson. The companies that do care about Android will play it safe and let HTC take on all the initial risk and see how that goes before committing any serious resources to the platform. The only Android phones that have a chance of coming to market in the next 9 months are from HTC.

There will not be 100 different Android phones on multiple carriers anytime soon - there will be one or two HTC phones on T-Mobile.

stcredzero6• 18 years ago

If someone can build something like the iPod Touch, but with GPS and Wimax or EVDO, then kids will acquire it and use it. If it can take over the functionality of SMS and go beyond it, then a younger generation would use this instead of cell phones. Then a Chinese manufacturer would build units with microphones and swiveling cameras, and the cell phone carriers would be SOL.

stcredzero6• 18 years ago

iPhone 3G likely represents a mistake. Apple has been making tons of money by building Ok hardware with superior design packaged with a seamless user experience, for which they can charge a hefty premium. iPhone 3G was an attempt to go mass market too quickly. They need to go back to their strengths.

cmars232• 18 years ago

How can we be sure Google or other wireless carriers won't restrict apps in a similar manner as Apple?

shimi3• 18 years ago

You don't, but historically Google were more developer oriented then most other IT Giants

samwise• 18 years ago

Well put Matt. I agree 100%. It will be interesting to see if Steve Jobs learned his lesson.

mattmaroon10• 18 years ago

He hasn't. He's the quintessential authoritarian. Openness is as alien to him as swimming is to a cat.

river_styx• 18 years ago

What lesson should he have learned, exactly? I think rather that he has taught us a big lesson of late -- open or not, if you create a compelling product, people will break down your doors and line up for hours in order to get it.

mattmaroon10• 18 years ago

I'm not so sure. The only thing Apple is dominant at right now are mp3 players, and to my knowledge those don't/can't compete against any sort of open platform. There's no question that their computer sales are doing pretty well, and that quality sells, but they're still far from dominant.

TCL15• 18 years ago

You have to keep in mind that the app store was a response to people jail breaking the iphone and installing 3rd party apps. Apple never wanted developers messing with it's precious device but they finally gave and look what happened.

sayrer2• 18 years ago

What exactly is open about it? It's not open source.

glymor• 18 years ago

You're factually inaccurate.

Android being released under the Apache licence, it's taking it's sweet time about it but that's what it should all be licenced under: http://code.google.com/android/kb/licensingandoss.html

sayrer2• 18 years ago

I used the present tense. They say it will be open source at some point, but it's not for now, and the license won't require them to release all of it.

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

Virtualization comes to mobile phones. Iphone supports Android. End of it.

ashu2• 18 years ago

And runs slower than a retarded turtle? The iPhone has trouble running its Springboard GUI efficiently as it is.

mattmaroon10• 18 years ago

Lol, yeah. Mobile device processors are still quite a ways away from that.

drewcrawford• 18 years ago

The OP is actually pretty close to the money. Android applications are virtualized on Android phones (see: Dalvik). It wouldn't be impossible for Apple to implement Dalvik and a few wrappers for the APIs and tie it to Springboard.

Actually, apart from the Springboard part, and some questionable clauses in the dev agreement, there's nothing to prevent any Joe Schmo from porting much of Android to iPhone and putting it up on the App Store. Apps are written in objective-C which is an ANSI C superset, so there wouldn't be any speed issue.

Compound this with the fact that Eric Schmidt is on Apple's board of directors, and I would say some form of Android compatibility is pretty likely in iPhone's future.

mattmaroon10• 18 years ago

If that's true, is that good or bad for Android? Seems like they get a more vibrant developer ecosystem as a result.

utnick• 18 years ago

For pay apps, I would much rather develop and sell on the app store and not have to worry about license keys, copy protection, credit card merchants, and testing on multiple devices like you probably will if you are selling an android app.

shimi3• 18 years ago

The Android SDK is in its early stages and suffers from some bugs which is expectable.

It's a good set of Java namespaces that provides a good control over the device resources. As it Java the environment is managed which makes the application development process quite easy. The GUI development is using an XML based documents that the developer can set widgets into.

No one outside google knows what the performance penalty of the managed environment, and please don't start with the Java is slow blubber, blackberry is all Java as well.

My vote: if google will deliver what they promise than they should be a strong player in the market.

gamble• 18 years ago

The marketing of Android as the 'open' smartphone OS has always seemed a bit ad-hoc to me. When Google originally drew up its plans for Android, long before the iPhone was public knowledge, they were much more worried about WiMo shutting them out of the mobile search market. Android isn't any more open than WiMo or Palm - the point was to be the smartphone that worked well. To be the iPhone, really.

Unfortunately for Google, Apple beat them to the punch. Android was announced three months after the iPhone was on shelves; the only way for Google to distinguish their product was to emphasize how unconstrained it is compared to the iPhone, even if there was nothing particularly special about allowing 3rd party apps until Apple prohibited them.

The number of people who actually care about the openness of a platform is very small, particularly in consumer electronics. It isn't a panacea. Openness didn't help Plays-for-Sure beat the iPod, and the Palm ecosystem didn't save it from Windows Mobile and Blackberry.

I wish people would stop dredging up the example of Windows and the Mac - openness mattered in desktop operating systems because it enabled PCs to be sold at a huge discount relative to Macs during the 90s. Spending $2000 versus $3000 on a PC meant something, but the comparison isn't relevant to smartphones. Openness will not make Android significantly cheaper than the iPhone.

It may sound like I'm dumping on Android, but that's not my intention. It seems like a nice enough platform - better than some geriatric OSs I could mention. (ahem) It's the marketing spin I don't appreciate.

davidw2• 18 years ago

> It’s much like Apple vs. Microsoft in the early ’90s.

It's even better than that, it's like Apple vs Linux backed by the power of a big company that also cares a lot about the user experience from the get go. As long as Android has any market share, it'll be where I'm at.

Android FTW

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