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Android FTW

mattmaroon.com

32 pointssant0sk149 comments

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.

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.

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.

Well, it is true that, being open source (well, it will be), the carriers could hack it to be just as closed and broken as they want. Whether that happens lots, none, or something in between is anyone's guess.

This statement was made before any handsets have come to market. How many carriers do they have? I'll believe it when I see it.

Carrier certification works differently outside the US and can be much less restrictive. In most of the world it isn't a Apple/Blackberry one point five horse race, but rather a much more diverse fight. I would certainly encourage anyone who is counting Nokia out to go and pick up a E71 and give it a go.

Don't let the local market distort your perspective unless you want to limit your reach.

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.

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.

Eh, you might be right in that it's not entirely typical, but it's a pretty significant chunk of their users. There have been many other problems as well, especially with the 3g model. Lots of people have been returning them.

My point wasn't to enumerate its flaws, but rather to point out that it's far from all roses in terms of owner experience.

iPhone owner here. Roses? Not entirely.

I don't understand why anyone takes Matt seriously, everything he writes is very trollish. He's some sort of Apple bigot.[1]

I've seen him claim that Apple's "service is atrocious" yet their service is consistently ranked at the top.[2][3] Other times, he'll give some lame anecdote about his friend's MacBook constantly needing repair or receiving bricked iPhones. I have no idea if those stories are true, but if we made a poll, I think we'd find that he's exaggerating.

Once a troll in the poker world, today he's moved to this little corner of the Internet. Matt: we still hate your online persona.[4]

[1] http://searchyc.com/mattmaroon+apple

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150563

[3] http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1689

[4] http://mazeorbowie.blogspot.com/2006/12/why-i-hate-matt-maro...

People take me seriously because my arguments are well-reasoned and well-written. People mistake me for trollish because they are very direct. For instance, the 4th one you cited objected to the use of the word "retard" to describe someone who did something very dumb. If only I were as smart as Ben Stiller I would have somehow made millions off of it.

I have to admit, I've been called a lot of stuff, but you're the first person to actually back it up with citations. Only on Hacker News..,

You also tend to pick topics that people feel very strongly about and are sure to push buttons.

It's interesting how easily people are subjected to ad hominem attacks if they dare to criticise Apple. There are unhappy Apple customers. Count my vote. And just because Apple censors their own message boards doesn't mean they should be able to count on their "loyal followers" to oppress opinion elsewhere.

I don't want to defend Apple. Infact, I don't even use their products. My point is that he's as guilty as an Apple fanboy, except he's a member of the Apple haters' cult.

Some of his posts above about Apple products are just not factual. There have not been widespread issues with bricked iPhones nor have people been returning them in droves like he's claimed. I'd imagine that you could make the same exaggerations about the Motorola RAZR. There are always defective products from the factory and people who return them; the numbers are not any higher with the iPhone.

I don't think it's fair to dismiss Apple as hype.[1] Let's give them credit for creating some very well designed products and hate them for the right reasons.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=275608

It should be possible to dispute someone's claims without resorting to vitriolic ad hominem attacks.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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.

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.

Why isn't an open source mp3 player winning against the iPod? Customers don't care if things are open or not. Unless android is put on drop dead sexy phones with killer features, it'll fail.

Put Android on something like the iPod Touch with GPS and advanced IM apps, and you could get middle school and high school kids hooked on this, especially if the rates could undercut cell phones by a factor of 2 or 3. (Which would be easy to do.)

How would you get them hooked? "Advanced IM apps"? I don't understand how Android instantly gives you killer apps you can't get on the iPod/iPhone.

By advanced IM apps, I meant something that could get connectivity through Wimax or EVDO. As for getting them hooked, if you remember awhile back, kids were heavily into pagers. IM style communication integrated with GPS that they'd get with a music player (which they need anyhow) might create a similar trend with middle school kids.

Android wouldn't be necessary, but that would bring an open App development ecosystem with it, which would be great.

Sorry, being from the UK, pagers died out in the 1980s. It's all SMS here...

It'll certainly be interesting to see what android can bring.

Pagers died out long ago here too. The point is: there was once a trend among youth where alternative cheap communications was used in place of the cell phone.

If that can happen once, it can happen again. And SMS price structure is bloated. Things are ripe for a change.

The end user doesn't care about openness directly, just as they didn't care about it in the case of Windows vs. Mac or internet vs. AOL. It's the benefits of openness they care about.

In the case of cell phones, the benefits are large and obvious. In the case of mp3 players I can't think of any.

They cared in the case of AOL vs internet, because AOL completely sucked. Similarly, a growing number care in the case of Windows vs Mac/Linux, because Windows is so awful.

Is the iPhone, or other smartphone for that matter broken enough to cause pain to users?

I don't know, you could be right, but I don't see the problem that gets solved by Android right now for the average user.

Windows didn't take over the market because Mac OS sucked. It won because it allowed scores of OEMs to make all sorts of computers targeted at all sorts of consumers.

That's the same with the iPhone. Believe it or not, a lot of people hate AT&T. Or they have family on Verizon, and get free minutes when talking to them, so they sign up with Verizon. Or Sprint or T-mobile or whoever else. Or they get 15% off from work.

No matter how great the iPhone is, being tethered to AT&T means that >2/3 of customers won't even consider it. What this means is that Android, by being on whichever carriers want it, immediately appeals to at least 2x the number of customers. It could be significantly less good than the iPhone, and it will still sell more.

Then there's the form factors. It might be hard to believe, but most people just want to talk on their phone. Android can be on a cheap-ass clamshell. People with cheap-ass clamshells might still want to check the weather, play simple games, etc, so there will still be a market for apps there.

A lot of people use their mobile for business. They care about call quality, battery life, and a keypad, all things the iPhone sucks at. Those people will, on whichever carrier their company has a deal with, have Android phones available to them that fit that needs. (No idea if any will make inroads on Blackberry though.)

The iPhone has Apple/AT&T's marketing budget. Android has Google, a bunch of OEMs, and a bunch of carriers.

All of those are inherent benefits of openness.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

SUN actually promised to deliver a J2ME interpreter to the iPhone

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.

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

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

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

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.

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