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Comment by pcestrada | Hacker News Reader

I think a big advantage that the iPhone has over Android is that Apple is able to synchronize hardware and software development since it exists within the same company. I imagine Google works with handset vendors but there must be inherent inefficiencies in communicating across multiple companies. Apple can maintain a yearly drumbeat of putting out a polished product where the software and hardware dovetail nicely.

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I agree, plus the different Android phone vendors are also competing against each other. Oneupmanship shows up in the devices with a myriad of sometimes semi-incompatible device features.

It's not so different than the PC world, but it increases the complexity of the ecosystem so much that sometimes the tight integration that Apple offers suffers on other platforms.

I don't understand why that's an advantage? It's just another of Apple's control vices. The hardware of the phone functions independently of the software and vice versa. Maybe for things like fragmentation or updates it makes sense, but I don't really see Google putting on the brakes because they don't make the hardware. Ironically that's the very thing leading to the so called "fragmentation problem".

A good example is upgrading the quality of the iPhone video recording and simultaneously releasing iMovie to go with it. So you get a hardware upgrade and a much more practical way of using the hardware. For many people syncing videos off the phone and editing them on a PC (especially Windows) is just too much of a hassle. Android phones have had video this quality of video recording for months but don't have anything like iMovie which might make the hardware capabilities less appealing to someone. Another example is the front facing camera which you can presently get in the Sprint Evo. How many Android apps support switching camera sources? They're relying on Qik for video chat which has experienced major problems since the Evo's release. Who's accountable for that? Not Google, Not HTC, not even Sprint. They just throw the stuff out there and hope it works right. Hardware has to be accessible to people via software or it's just a geek fetish.

But in the land of pure unbundledness and light, the upcoming hardware improvements would have been made known to all simultaneously, and more than one group could have been making software for it. Possibly giving you more choice on the first day the hardware was available. So the thinking goes.

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