Is Android Only Surging Because Apple Is Letting It? | Hacker News Reader

Is Android Only Surging Because Apple Is Letting It?

techcrunch.com

24 pointsAinab43 comments

It's a shame he didn't really actually address the question that is the title of his article. Whatever else we know about the Apple vs Google situation one thing is sure: Jobs is seriously burned by Android's success and there is not a chance in hell he is "letting" Android win. Whatever is happening out there is happening despite Jobs' best efforts to stop it, not because he is "letting" it happen.

Personally, I think that just as there is a slightly delusional sense about Apple's competitors that all they need to do is make something in the same category as an Apple device without any of the design brilliance or attention to detail to succeed, there is also a slightly delusional part of the Apple camp where they believe that design and enforced simplicity is the be-all and end all of the user experience. Like this guy who is simply confounded that anybody is buying Android phones and hence comes up with, by process of elimination more than anything else, that it must be AT&T's fault. In reality, many people actually care about features, power and flexibility too. Nobody likes to think of themselves as being paternalised and Apple does that all the time. Not to mention that many people dislike being treated as a channel for mass-market commercialism that Apple wants them to be.

My mother came to me last week for the third time to plead with me to tell her some way - any way - to use something other than iTunes to manage her iPod Touch. She doesn't understand it. It confounds her at every step. She hates it. I told her what I always tell her: "Look, there are ways, but the bottom line is, it is designed to be used a certain way, and only that way. Get to know that way, try it out how it is intended to be used and you might find it is wonderful - many people do. But in the end, Apple is not about choices and alternatives, they are about simplification and control. If you really dislike it after really trying it Apple's way, I think you should think about getting a different device." She came back a bit later and asked me how much her iPod Touch might sell for on ebay.

I found very few factual things in that article. He's trying to make a point that android devices are worse or the only feature they have is that you're not forced to use Verizon. (where he's obviously forgetting that there's a universe outside of the US)

There are a dozen or more elements that are better about the iPhone. Everything from the big: the App Store versus the Android Market (from the consumer perspective) — to the little: the multi-touch and overall touchscreen responsiveness.

I would think Multi-touch/touch responsiveness has more to do with the devices and not the operating system.

I myself believe that Android will become the dominant OS on phones, because they've got developers on their side. All my hacker friends and developers are really excited to start hacking on android phones (as am I) and not so interested in developing for iPhone. I believe the biggest reason there are a lot of developers (more so companies) that flocked to iOS development is because of the marketplace, the opportunities it brought and that there wasn't any similar device available at that time.

A marketplace for apps will in the end become decentralized and the greatest apps will be for android because the smartest people will want to develop for it. History repeats itself.

There's more hacker affection for Linux than Windows, but somehow the year of Linux on the desktop was always right around the corner. Palm also had a devoted developer following, but it couldn't make up for mistakes at the mothership. In short history may repeat itself, but not the way you hope.

This is true. Money is a better predictor for success of a platform than hacker buzz, and right now iOS is still very dominant in terms of how many users are willing and able to buy apps and in-app purchases, and how much they're willing to spend. The Android Market is still largely dominated by freeware, which is partially due to restrictions that limit the countries in which users are able to buy apps.

just take a look at http://bit.ly/cUF0zC and see the disruption of experience there is between the myriad of flavor implementations in android... just for a single task which btw... is not implemented across all phones.

android still has a good way to go to catch up and in order to google get there they have to add more control to the experience and succeed because it is good and not because is good enough

Yet most of the software development done nowadays is web, and guess which is the favorite target for web deployments?

Linux is coming of age in a post-desktop world, so the question is almost irrelevant. What IS relevant is that the biggest web technologies being used right now, as well as the technologies that will some day become dominant (Ruby, Scala, Haskell, Node.js, and others) are primarily for Linux and by Linux devs.

But as far as smartphones go, the question is still open, the market is still up for grabs, so developer-friendliness is going to be a top priority. Right now iPhone may be the top platform, but I would not underestimate Google's ability to appeal to developers (neither Apple's ability to make successive, giant leaps).

Most of the technologies you have enumerated only have mind-share on places like Reddit & HN. The exception is Ruby, which is still a drop in the ocean when compared to big players like PHP or Java. I'll give you the benefit of doubt and assume that you're just joking with Haskell and Scala. There are exactly ZERO Haskell jobs available in my country.

Second of all, those technologies are not Linux-centric, they are all cross-platform. A one-OS programming language/library is worthless in the present, except in rare cases such as specialized hardware-software solutions or in-house software.

> There's more hacker affection for Linux than Windows, but somehow the year of Linux on the desktop was always right around the corner.

Just like the year of Mac on the desktop, Linux is around 1% and Mac 5%... and Mac is backed by a multi-billion dollar company. I think it has more to do with Microsoft winning the desktop platform a long time ago than anything else. Where Linux and Mac can make a dent is in the web and mobile, and they already did.

Yeah but the main issue with Linux versus Windows was always that Linux was more difficult to get to work than Windows, you had to do magic to get it to work with your hardware, and it was much too difficult to get to use out of the box.

Android has none of these problems, it is on a large amount of devices (more than ios), it is as shiny as Apples, but it has developers loving programming it.

Heck Linux own the server market so completely, that the only thing that could reasonably replace it would be another Unix.

(where he's obviously forgetting that there's a universe outside of the US)

Google's not doing much better, in regards to remembering the rest of the world. Paid apps from Android App Store are only available in what? 12 countries?

I have been reading hello, android (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/eband3/hello-android) and it says that the multitouch is buggy and returns impossible values which tells me that it could very well be a software problem in android.

My Motorola Droid's touchscreen can't match the iPhone, but I've played with a few display models, and the Droid X among others are neck-and-neck.

However, I have to say that improving hardware on my Droid would be a waste of money without large improvements in the network. Even with fantastic 3G coverage, the bottleneck for most tasks I'm looking to accomplish is the network, not the device.

If consumers aren't backing the Android phones it makes no difference if the developers are on the their side. Plus, now when you develop for the iPhone, you are almost also developing for iPad. Android still has a long way before catching up to Apple

I think evidence points to this being true. For instance, in Australia - a technically advanced market where the iPhone is available on every major wireless carrier - the carrier exclusivity doesn't warp market share in Androids favour:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/surging-iphone...

As of May 2010, Android is at 2.1% smartphone market share, the iPhone is at 40.3% smartphone market share.

In the US, the iPhone's AT&T exclusivity gives Android protection from true competition. When the customer can select a phone on its own merits and not due to network availability I'm sure that the market share picture may be different.

That is highly dependent on the availability of handsets and plans, so there's never a true disconnect between OS, handset, and plans.

In South America, Motorola pushed the Milestone model, hard, and it's just as if not more popular than the iPhone, but both are dwarfed by Blackberry, and the Milestone is the only real high-end Android device available. If the Nexus One or Galaxy S were for sale the numbers would be very different.

Australia, just like many other countries, has fairly hefty import tariffs on high-tech goods, so the country of origin of different devices has a nontrivial influence on handset availability, and thus general popularity of each platform.

In the UK it's just under 20% for Android: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/apr/30/android-goo... with iPhone available on all carriers.

I've done some Android development and didn't think it was that bad. It was definitely something of a struggle at first (not the least because I hadn't used Java - er, a Java-like-language - since my freshman year of college), but it grew on me quickly and it didn't take me long to internalize most of the important design patterns. That being said, I've never done any iPhone development, so I can't really compare.

As to the phones themselves, I don't think its as clear cut as the author suggests. I bought a first generation iPhone, but when it eventually met its demise I picked up a G1 on eBay. The G1 was obviously pretty horribly specced, but I liked enough about it to eventually got a Nexus One and rather like it. Its lacking a lot of the polish of iOS, but seems generally a lot more capable. I don't know anything about the history of using a back button for navigation through multiple applications, but that and a few other things (the notification UI for example) really pay off for Android.

I'll probably get another iPhone at some point (I'm still on AT&T and have never gotten a subsidized phone from them - I got that original iPhone before they subsidized them) to play with development on it, if nothing else. But for my primary phone I'm probably going to stick with Android, at least for the foreseeable future. Its far from perfect but it works a lot better for me.

Of course I'm not at all your typical phone user, so what I think probably doesn't mean that much.

They shouldn't let MG Siegler write about iOS v. Android on TechCrunch. :)

yep, saw the title, thought 'bet its MG Siegler', opened to confirm my suspicions then closed it. Getting really old now IMO.

I really like his social networking trends posts though. :)

Every time I see iPhone/Android articles like these I think of this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/science/06tier.html?_r=1&#...

"But the iPhone does exist. And I simply can’t bring myself to use an Android phone when I know a superior device is out there."

WTF?

That line reminds me of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg

The iPhone has many more deficiencies besides being limited to one carrier. Though I suppose that is the only one that most consumers care about.

I can't but agree with MG... even when he is an apple fan boy diehard... for the most part everything he writes has some point of trueness.

For me, as a entrepreneur and with a product targeting both platforms, the experience with android has made me think twice the whole idea of iphone and its appstore stupidity, in a way where it makes me believe they are there for a reason.

Apple provides probably the best user experience for a mobile phone out there, everything is consistent, simple and geared to make the life of their users likewise... and apple enforces this but also they provide tools so that we as developers stay that way with not too much pain.

Android on the other hand stays too much to its Linux parenthood... yes it's open, yes you can do lots of stuff with it, it even can power the coffee pot if you wanted it to... but everything comes at a price! And the price that google has have to pay for that "flexibility" comes in direct impact of the experience... and microsoft seems to have learnt this too, hence the level of control they are putting back on the WP7.

Google has to pick up the ball while there is still time... provide developers with the right tools so we don't go reinventing the warm water everything we need to do something and provided them so that it remains consistent with the experience the have created with the phone... and enforce OEMs to do the same.

Now will google do this before apple pulls the trigger on new carriers for the iPhone or before WP7 takes power?... I hope so, as competition is always good for innovation.

in the mean time I will keep my Galaxy (with its 12+ carrier stupid apps) at lab for testing purposes and will carry my iPhone for the every day experience.

Has the author not used a Droid X? Swype and eerily accurate speech-to-text are radically better than any input methods I've seen on the iPhone. Before Swype, I couldn't have imagined giving up my Treo 755P keyboard. Now I couldn't go back.

I personally haven't seen this kind of discussion change a single opinion.

As for the title question, we've all seen the customer satisfaction numbers and the willingness to switch numbers: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/smartphones/?p=816, so I think, hinging on the credibility of these data, it's an empirical fact that iPhone stands a lot to gain by going to Verizon. If you're an iPhone developer, like myself, these data ought to be reassuring.

It's clear that the tech blogosphere and its core readership have a hint of counter-consumerist taste which makes it very bad at predicting the success of consumer products (we've seen a ghosts from 2007 this weekend on HN, and I suspect the "iPad will fail" articles are bound to crop up and bite certain bloggers later). The remedy (please) is some good old fashioned market research if we're going to make business/startup decisions based on such discussions. Eh?

PS: The top comment of this TechCrunch article is perpetrating this "Big Brother" analogy with respect to Apple's app store approval. As an English major, this has been bothering me for a while. Have these guys read 1984? "Big Brother" is supposed to represent the panopticon surveillance state, you know, one where your footsteps are tracked and recorded constantly. Sounds more like someone else to me.

The people comparing Apple's approval process to 1984 are clearly drawing parallels with the torture scenes where the protagonist is ultimately convinced that he shouldn't have done what he did and Big Brother is ultimately right - which sounds exactly like Apple. If you don't like it, it was a good choice and you're just looking at it from the wrong angle.

You're speaking in black and white where shades of gray are clearly the order of the day. Google exhibits certain traits of the 1984 state, Apple others.

Then they are Winston Smith, not Big Brother.

No, in the perfectly valid analogy, we are Winston Smith, Apple is Big Brother. Though it also might be argued that in this analogy you are O'Brien.

Apple is not Big Brother: they don't use their technology to spy on and track users. They don't opt users into new privacy-violating features, like Buzz. The surveillance is the KEY reason why Orwell set it in the future--it's a technology that he can take advantage of to make the society seem that much more terrifying. If you're trying to find a random dictator whose rules oppress us, you have a feast of other dictators to choose from. If you're going to use Big Brother, if you don't have an analogy to draw with his omniscience and omnipresence, then you aren't making a good analogy. Unless you're in 10th grade and Big Brother is just a proxy for dictatorship.

You know, while we're on the topic, Google aren't exactly rushing full speed ahead to make the best app experience on a phone. It's not their incentive to work towards the best native app user experience, because that takes away from the web traffic that makes them the real money. And they can't track us in apps. But who cares, right? It's free. Another social contract of sorts.

Why is it so important to you that Google is evil and Apple is good? That's why Apple is like Big Brother. Fanatical, unreasoning devotion is a key component of Orwell's dystopia. Google doesn't have that.

All I'm saying is that Big Brother is a stupid analogy and that it can just as swiftly be applied to Google for its obsession with collecting personal data with their free services. This ultimately damages customer value because it commits them to pushing inferior web app experiences that must be downloaded from scratch each time a user attempts to access a particular service.

I am not for strong accusations and name calling (and I deliberately didn't mention Google by name in my original post), but evidently you have no problem making this personal. If you look over this discussion, you're the one affixing labels on everything (including me). I have no commitment to maintaining intellectually impoverished rhetorical positions. In my opinion, such positions are ruining the discourse. I still don't understand why free and open-source advocates try to brush development, security, privacy, usability, compatibility, and monetization issues under a rug. Can we not fix a price to those elements? Are we so extreme that we can't accept that there are tradeoffs inherent to the system, and that approval doesn't have to necessarily equal malevolent control?

In tech, if we don't appreciate--and point out--the nuances of different kinds of relationships and different stances regarding privacy, cost, and experience, then ultimately we lose as entrepreneurs and developers because we don't see the next big thing coming, or we overvalue something that consumers are not necessarily interested in. Equating app store approval with Big Brother doesn't help anybody, and it deliberately slants the discussion.

> Have these guys read 1984? "Big Brother" is supposed to represent the panopticon surveillance state, you know, one where your footsteps are tracked and recorded constantly. Sounds more like someone else to me.

Android is open source, if you believe it's spying on you, feel free to remove the bits of code you don't like, there are many ROMs available already. Now try to do the same with the iPhone, plus last time I checked it requires you to give your credit card before even using it...

But on the other hand, any carrier and manufacture can inject the needed tracking code without asking anyone.

There must have been some sort of "out" for Apple in their contract with AT&T. I've never seen a contract without some sort of early termination section. (I'm not a lawyer, but I work with them on business contracts often.)

It must be a prohibitively large dollar amount for Apple to end the agreement early, which is surprising since I think it's been far more successful than anyone could have imagined -- so I assume what would have at launch seemed like a ridiculous sum would now be quite affordable for Apple to remove the 100lb gorilla in the room.

I'm so glad in australia we can have the iphone on all our networks... Just one more reason that this is the best country in the world ;)

Except for the internet censorship part ;)

There was a lot of noise about that, but in reality the internet "filtering" proposals have not (yet) been enacted and thanks to the latest election result look pretty much guaranteed to be unpassable now.

What is the iPhone/Android proportion on AT&T?

How about in countries where the iPhone is available on all carriers?

That would be more instructive than a US/AT&T-centric analysis.

Yes, the market share picture is very different outside of the US; see my previous comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1665780

I would guess that the iPhone/Android proportion on AT&T is heavily skewed toward the iPhone because AT&T's Android devices are all underpowered and locked down relative to their counterparts on every other US network.

This, and other coverage of the android vs. apple competition seems to alway miss an important point. For instance he says "if the iPhone didn't exist, I'd certainly use an android", and that they are much better than other phones that are out there.

But if the iPhone didn't exist, the android phone wouldn't exist in its current form.

He didn't miss it, the point is not relevant to the article. The author is focused on analyzing the present and speculating about the future. He's not performing a rigorous "what if" alternate reality exercise.

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