The Android Opportunity
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
I was on the train today, and wanted to catch up on HN. I read five or six articles, and all of them rendered perfectly in the included browser.
Basically, this is what I consider an absolutely perfect phone experience. I could not be happier, as an end user. (And as a developer, I am really really happy.)
I am just confused as to what these iPhone converts are doing. I think they are expecting an iPhone clone instead of a completely different smartphone.
One more thing. I found this comment especially ignorant:
Android suffers from the same issues that have plagued Linux on the desktop for years: the lack of integration between software and hardware, buggy and under-featured applications, a lack of attention paid to user experience issues. The encouraging openness and bits of innovation in Android are overshadowed by mediocrity.
What does this even mean? I see perfect integration between my apps (and the Google apps on my computer), and of course, the underlying OS kernel has no effect on the user experience unless it is really bad.
That's exactly why iPhone is superior (so far): it is not about what, it is about how
Please explain in detail what you mean.
Update: I do not say that Android phones are economy class and iPhone is private jet. The point of the above is to explain what I meant by difference between what and how.
The battery life is a lot better than my old Windows Mobile phone, but I have not gotten anywhere near running low yet, so I can't really comment. My impression is that heavy use does not really run the battery down that quickly.
Performance really depends on what you have in the background. K9 totally kills it for me, because my IMAP server sucks. Google Sky Map and the Market sometimes lag for me. Google Reader can also be very slow. Otherwise, everything is good. I have a task manager installed, but since I stopped using K9, I have not needed it.
It is not a flawless experience, of course, but so much works incredibly well that I don't really care. Google does care about the details (changing colors, syncing contacts), and the third-party apps are really cool. (I forgot to mention Locale above; it's awesome! I never forget to turn my ringer on at home.)
So battery is not as good, but the notifications are always timely, since they work in background and latitude keeps my position updated, those are probably the culprit for shorter battery life.
- Why does the phone crash when I try to pair with my bluetooth headset?
- Why do all eleventy-billion of my contacts show up in the dialer instead of the relatively small handful who've got phone numbers?
- Why the *@#$% doesn't this thing have a proper headphone jack?
- How do I sync music between my computer and my G1?
- How about podcasts?
- How do I play videos on this thing?
- When I mark a contact as a "favorite", how do I change which phone number gets dialed from the favorite screen?
- Why don't I get autocompletion when I use the hardware keyboard?
- Why does the system freeze for about a second when I rotate it?
- Why do about 25% of the apps I have not work with the soft keyboard?
- Why do another 25% not work in horizontal mode?
- Where's the PDF reader?
- Why can't I read Google documents on this thing?
Shall I continue?
I had no trouble finding a video app in the app store that worked fine.
A good PDF viewer is RepliGo Reader. It's $8 US, but no available in some Android Markets (such as Canada).
I get Google Docs just fine. Google for "Google Docs", tap the first result, and there they all are.
I sync my music with a Perl script that looks at my xmms2 playlist and copies the music in there to the phone. (Not possible with the iPhone, BTW.)
What you consider major flaws are things I have never had a problem with. I do have a few contacts with no phone numbers, but I can also tap them to chat with them via GTalk. (A green light appears next to their name when they are online. Cool!)
Nothing is perfect, nor will it ever be. With the iPhone, you are stuck with whatever Apple says you are stuck with. With Android, you are stuck with whatever you decide not to write.
BTW, one complaint: I wish I had the Kindle app for this phone.
Some other things:
The iPhone is just as bad with respect to proprietary connectors. If you don't have an Offical Apple Cable, you can't even charge your phone. With the HTC devices, you just plug in a standard mini-USB cable. Tradeoff.
For some reason I don't think this is exactly what Gruber had in mind when he said, "The goal should be to make a phone that is better than the iPhone. Better."
I think a lot of people design systems for imaginary users that don't actually exist. I try to make stuff that works for me, because then at least it works for one person.
(I assume "normal people" use some sort of GUI for this. If you are using Amarok, for example, it's a simple matter of drag-n-dropping your playlist to the icon that says "Android Phone".)
"Normal people", by which I mean myself, want to plug in their iPhone and have all of their stuff synced without ever clicking any button. Drag-n-drop is nice, but even that's more of a hassle than I care to bother with.
If syncing is on by default, having to turn it on doesn't sound like "ever clicking any button".
Usability testing should trump hunches. I polled my room mates (small poll, but still 4 > 1), none of us have a music library small enough to fit on an iPhone and none of us want all of our music/videos/photos on our mobile device for a variety of reasons. Drag and drop in iTunes is preferable for us.
And I have an iPhone, I've had it wiped out by iTunes. I'd rather have drag and drop like a normal file system from Explorer.
On the Android part I sync my music with Banshee ;)
This article isn't about Apple's doing everything perfectly, it's saying that there are a lot of things they do incredibly well that Android sucks at, and it's saying that it wishes Android would make itself less sucky at those things. That's what this conversation's focusing on, not "Does Android do some things better than the iPhone?". We know the answer to that is yes and it's foolish to argue it.
People write for the iPhone because of the imagined mass market (which brought the cost of every useful app down to 99 cents), and people write for Android because they are programmers and it's cooler. The end result is lots of apps in both cases.
Remember, you are not a Google or Apple shareholder, so all you should care about availability of good apps. Both phones both have the same good apps, with a slight edge towards Android (because of more capabilities).
The argument over applications is one-sided. Apple's doing a shit job. But people still write more applications for it, because Apple offers a better product than Google does. Not a better development environment. Not a better marketplace (though that one's debatable). A better product.
What do you plan to run your software geek nirvana on, anyway? If noone buys the platform, what happens 3 years from now?
As a meta-question: What do you think would've happened to linux and it's desktop if solaris' or even windows server licensing terms were more reasonable at the outset? If Mr Shuttleworth decided his money was better spent feeding children on his home continent rather than making Debian look nicer? Think about it...
But that's not even the point, really. From the perspective of the cell phone manufacturers, eliminating or reducing the expense of developing an OS is good for their bottom line. As long as Android is "good enough" for most users, I foresee it continuing to be used.
If I had to determine, based on previous personal observations, which was more likely to exist, iTunes users or perl script users, I would have to conclude that you are imaginary.
My wife syncs music her G1 using Windows Media Player, because she's used it for years and likes it.
People who use Linux plug in their phone and Banshee syncs to it.
I don't think iPhone does WMP or Banshee. Sure, it's made by Apple, but my wife doesn't really care: she just want's it to work with her computer, without having to change all her software.
Videos, there is an application called "Video Player" that actually, well, plays videos.
Because the Dialer app is listing all of your contacts, because it serves as both the Dialer and the Contacts app all rolled into one.
- Why the @#$% doesn't this thing have a proper headphone jack?
Yell at HTC, not Android.
- How do I sync music between my computer and my G1?
Plug the included USB cable into your PC. Android will pop up a notification allowing you to choose if you want to mount the internal SD card as a drive on the host machine. Use Finder/Nautilus/Explorer to copy music to the drive, or Google for the proper file that tells the PC that your G1's SD card is actually a music device so that your music apps will sync with it.
Arguably, the G1 should do this for you, but what if you put your camera's SD card into the G1? It wouldn't know the difference, but you wouldn't want it to label the SD card as a music player without you asking it to...
- How about podcasts?
Get a podcast app, or see above?
- How do I play videos on this thing?
Use the included YouTube app, or download a file-manager app (I recommend the Linda File Manager) and click on the video from the file manager. Yes, Android should include this type of app out of the box.
- When I mark a contact as a "favorite", how do I change which phone number gets dialed from the favorite screen?
Open the contact, long-press on the desired number, and select Make Default Number.
- Why don't I get autocompletion when I use the hardware keyboard?
Because, arguably, most people using a real keyboard don't generally need/want auto-completion? Also because with the physical keyboard, there's no keyboard "app" being used in the first place, which is what provides the auto-completion you speak of.
- Why does the system freeze for about a second when I rotate it?
Because of the way Android handles apps. When the screen rotates, Android sends the "Stop" signal to the current activity, resets the framebuffer, and then sends the "restart" signal to the activity, more-or-less forcing the activity to save and load its state and rebuild the UI. This allows Android and the application to pick up new resources or new UI layouts based on the new conditions of the phone (new resolution, keyboard availability, etc). See my previous comment on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=699223
- Why do about 25% of the apps I have not work with the soft keyboard?
Most likely because developers did some funky business under the expectation that the user would be using Android 1.0 and/or the G1's hardware keyboard. Please yell at developers to update their applications.
- Why do another 25% not work in horizontal mode?
Once again, developers can specify that applications only run in certain orientations, which can be useful in certain apps (eg, Solitaire really can't play well in portrait mode). Yell at the developers to knock it off if you disagree.
- Where's the PDF reader?
I believe there's one on the Market.
- Why can't I read Google documents on this thing?
I'm not sure why Google overlooked a native app for Docs, but they worked relatively well through the browser, last time I tried. There are also several "Office" apps on the Market, if you're interested...
Shall I continue?
I'd be happy to answer, refute, or agree with more complaints if you can keep them civil.
For example: yell at the hardware manufacturer instead of the software developer; yell at the app developers; if you need that functionality, go buy a 3rd party app; it's slow because of OS implementation details; it doesn't work as you'd expect it because of implementation details; Google's own apps work relatively well.
Users don't care about why something is slow or broken (from their perspective). They shouldn't have to care. They don't want to go find an app in the Market for basic functionality, and they don't want to write a Perl script, either. Apple gets this. I hope Google and their partners will some day.
Users don't want answers to these questions. The list of questions you replied to was a rhetorical way of saying this: the iPhone user experience is far superior.
This cuts both ways. An iPhone user doesn't care why Apple rejects good apps from the app store. An iPhone user doesn't care why his phone can't vibrate when someone uses his name in a tweet or pings him on IRC or talks to him via GTalk. An iPhone user doesn't care why his phone can't turn its ringer off during appointments, and set it to "ultra loud" when he is in his house.
Sure, Apple has technical explanations for all these things, but it doesn't make them go away.
It is all a matter, right now, of trading one set of problems for another. "Is iTunes sync worth not having Google Voice?", and so on.
Nobody is claiming Android is perfect, but it is important the keep in mind that Apple is not either.
This whole "Apple is perfect" thing is a straw man that I've seen many times before. The argument isn't that Apple's perfect. The argument's that Apple is really, really, really good, and that its competitors' products aren't as polished as its own products. Android's advantages, as you highlight here, are certainly appealing to some people, but not to mass consumers, who care more about smooth than they do about extensible.
(But thanks for answering the other questions. I am glad I am not the only person who likes Android :)
- because it serves as both the Dialer and the Contacts app all rolled into one.
Is this a good idea? When I'm in my Dialer, presumably I only want to call people. Surely the system should sense context (likewise, if I'm in the email app, it should show contacts for whom I have no email!).
- or Google for the proper file that tells the PC that your G1's SD card is actually a music device
Basic, fundamental functionality should not involve Googling for anything.
- Open the contact, long-press on the desired number, and select Make Default Number.
Invisible and undiscoverable except by accident - this is a UI failure. The fact that this is not displayed implies to the user that it cannot be changed. At least show which number it dials (e.g. on iphone it's "mobile", "home", etc).
- Because of the way Android handles apps. When the screen rotates...
Not a good enough excuse I don't think. Yeah, that's the way Android works, but it's still a huge UI failure that snaps users out of the experience and takes away from the fit-and-finish of the software significantly. Note that iPhone can do this transition smoothly, and applications can still pick up new resources, UI layouts, etc.
... at the end of the day there are a few rules of thumb I think:
- Users care far more about the fit and finish of your software than they do about its strict functionality - i.e. you can get away with lacking functionality, but nobody will forgive you for poor UX.
- Users don't really care if "there's an app for that" when it comes to what they consider to be basic functionality. Include the basic goodies (PDF reader for example, music sync software for example) with the box or your users will walk, regardless of how much you point at the app store.
This is the gist of the article I think. Android is a capable platform, but so far nobody has gone over with a fine toothed comb like Apple has and gotten rid of all of the little annoying bits.
There is a "dialer" app that shows the phone pad. There is a contacts app tha shows all your contacts. While the device has phone functionality, it actually does a lot more, and showing all your contacts, and all the methods to contact them, actually makes sense when you have multiple methods (voice, SMS, IM, email) available. The contacts list even shows you if someone is currently on IM.
[Open the contact, long-press on the desired number, and select Make Default Number is] Invisible and undiscoverable except by accident - this is a UI failure. The fact that this is not displayed implies to the user that it cannot be changed.
Just like the long hold on the icons on the iphone so you can move them around and rearrange them (and then they shake?) is invisible and undiscoverable except by accident. It took me forever to find out how to do this on my iPod touch.
Say I know Jeff sent me a website to look at. I can't remember whether this was via SMS or email.
* On iPhone, I had to open SMS, find messages, close SMS, open email.
* On Android, I just find Jeff's entry in people and look at everything he sent me - SMS, email, and calls.
We need a vendor to come in and "iPhone-ify" the experience. Smooth out the rough edges and finish the "full package" (e.g. music/podcast sync out of the box). I haven't looked into the Hero enough to know if they're it...
-My iPhone would not rotate when I was rotating my phone, I had to do it 2-3 times or exit safari and restart in the landscape orientation for it to switch. At other time the orientation changed but the width was not changed.
-I'm not a big fan of reboot so every 2 or 3 days safari would just start to crash on page load with no reason. Only solved by a reboot.
-On the reboot front, once I made everyone at home change there time. Since my phone is taking it's time from the cell provider and this as always worked correctly on my many Motorola phones, I told everybody they were 10 minutes forward. The day after, at work I saw the time on a friends iPhone and it was also 10 minutes forward. This made no sense, we have the same provider. It was probably more than a week since my last reboot. Android may have the same problem, I don't know.
-OS 3 gave us the search but before that remembering on which page some of the less used apps were was just a pain. I still don't like this way of organizing, but I lack a better solution.
-Talk about obscure way of doing some action on the iPhone. As an example, have you taken a screenshot? The way to do it appeared to you how?
-I think the HTC magic has too many buttons, but the iPhone lacks some. Even after a year of using my iPhone, I still sometimes closed the application with the home button while I was just trying to back off one level. In fact the back button on the Android and the way application stack themselves is really superior.
The iPhone 3Gs finally has a camera. Come on the 3G was not even able to read bar codes (except with red laser, doing image correction and enhancement)
After 2 weeks without my iPhone what I miss the most is the vibration/ringer switch. This is a great feature.
The one feature that keeps me from going back on the Android is the notifications "pull down"
One last thing, latitude on Android is awesome;-)
Using this device is like the death of a thousand cuts. None are even remotely fatal, but over time there's just a mounting list of little annoyances. Everything's 95%; nothing Just Works. I stopped using Linux on the desktop because I didn't want to have to be a sysadmin on my personal hardware; having to monkey with my phone is even less my idea of a good time.
My iPhone bit the dust, so I've been using a G1 that Google graciously gave me for free. I really want to like it! After just a couple days with it, though, I'm nearly ready to plunk down cash for a new iPhone. Google's seriously got a problem if they can't even get me to use their platform at the price free (actually, I'll save $200 if I stick with Android, so it's even worse).
(You also mentioned Xorg.conf. I have not had one of those for years.)
When did you stop using Linux? I have had either a laptop or desktop with Linux installed (Ubuntu, Gentoo and DSL) since 2003/4 and spend just as much time customizing it as my Mac or Windows installations. I actually save time in the long run, because of the magic of apt-get.
Everbody gives this logic, but I've installed Linux on plenty for non-techies, and they have no problems--at least, not more than they would have had.
(One of my laptops, for the life of me, would not hook up to an external monitor. That's it.)
So I carried and used the ADP1 every day for two months (plus about a month during late March/early April before I switched back to my iPhone 2G with a cracked screen.)
yes, the ADP1 is running (the official) cupcake release.
Within 24 hours of arriving back home, I went out an bought an iPhone 3GS.
The usability of the combination of Android+HTC's Dream is pure crap. Its functional, sure, but its not usable.
I too stopped using linux on the desktop (I've converted the company to Apple over the last 2 years.) apt-get can screw you, too.
We do use linux on two production webservers, and we ship a ton (no really, at least 2,000 lbs) of FreeBSD on various hardware every month.
They don't address the core need that the consumer has, which is a whole product that just works. Apple, at the moment, is doing a far better job.
Customers don't want to get into the nitty gritty on anything. A stock iPhone "just works" (syncing, videos, etc) without needing anything extra. It's hard to overvalue this.
Second, people love to do feature-by-feature comparisons. I liken this to having a choice between 1) a sandwich and 2) the same ingredients in a blender.
"Oh, the nutritional value is the same! It's easier to eat!" The value of "taste" (literal and figurative) is completely lost -- I don't know how to explain it aside from that. We don't want our food in liquid form, even though the results may be the same. Yet the blender vendor continues to be confused about why people don't want his "identical" (superior?) product.
And that's assuming the products are identical but packaged differently. Dozens of annoyances like "just install this, just tweak that" turn into "Just add salt, just microwave it, just use this spice and my blended concoction will be great!".
Depends on what you're trying to do. Syncing with my iPhone required plugging in a cable and doing a manual sync. Syncing with Android doesn't really exist: it's just always up to date, and doesn't need syncing.
The default Android video player could support more formats out of the box could be better. Then again, there are about 50 useful, everyday things I can do with Android that I couldn't with my iPhone - see my contacts on the map, not lose data when closing apps, publically stream video direct from my phone to the web, copy files to the device.
Also iPhone Safari crashed constantly when reading large engadget articles on every iPhone firmware from 1.01 to 3.00. Android's browser is far more reliable.
I used the phone for talk, lots of web browsing, podcasts, and music, mostly. The music transfer is lacking ... I just do file copies. YouTube works fine, haven' tried transferring videos.
Contacts -> Menu -> Display Group -> Contacts with phone numbers
I picked up an HTC Hero (More or less the G3, but I don't think out in the US yet) yesterday. The way it's going, I think I may love this phone more than my child.
Most of your problems are gone with this generation. It even has a standard headphone jack.
Android is catching up, fast.
Tip: make sure you get a Class 6 SDHC card if you're going to use a lot of apps at once.
When talking about Linux on the desktop, I'm not talking about the kernel, per se. Mostly, I'm talking about the user experience as informed by GNOME, KDE, and other Linux/Unix desktop environments, which have not been particular successes; Android's UX is a bit like GNOME on a phone, even if it doesn't use GTK widgets. This is to say that most of the applications are pale copies of standard applications on other mobile platforms, and that the UX is generally clunky.
When it does come to the kernel, I'm mostly talking about the difficulty of having an operating system that's designed to support a large variety of hardware. Perhaps I've gotten lemons, but the Android phones I've used seem to have a tentative relationship with their network interfaces.
I would actually welcome a platform that isn't an iPhone clone; that's why I got interested in Android in the first place. Android doesn't need to behave exactly like an iPhone to be a success in my book. It just needs to adhere to the same general level of quality control: things look good, they work right, the interface is intuitive, the hardware is speedy, third-party apps work 90% of the time. I don't care if the interface metaphors or hardware form factor is completely different. It just needs to not suck.
The Palm Pre and Android are both at a huge advantage here. That may not be true when Apple's deal with AT&T runs up though, but for now it's easily the biggest competitive edge available.
I think there is a lot of truth to that, but I also have seen a big shift since the iPhone. Countless friends and colleagues of mine have said something along the lines of "I would never use AT&T if it were not for the iPhone."
It's probably more effective at keeping people on AT&T who would otherwise have left than in bringing new people on.
It's a good thing that AT&T sucks so much. Otherwise, the iPhone would be unstoppable.
But it's not a massive change in the power balance between carriers and phones. Carriers aren't going to offer massive concessions for something that brings in a few % more users than the other 50 phones in their lineup average. Don't forget that overall, the iPhone isn't even in the top 10.
Your qualifier here explains why Gruber doesn't dwell on this. He wants a competitor to Apple that can succeed in the long haul, not a bunch of scavengers who survive for another year or two, picking off the edges of the market that Apple hasn't gotten around to steamrolling yet.
Indeed, my off-the-cuff take on the state of the market is that Apple's carrier exclusivity is a positive danger to the competition. Because it means that the market sends all the wrong signals. You put out an iPhone knockoff that runs on another carrier, and a bunch of people sign up. Your product is a success! But: The reason your product is succeeding is that the playing field isn't level. And it's non-level in a way that Apple can fix, just as soon as the agreement with AT&T runs out.
My take on the smartphone market in the USA is that Apple's competition needs to race to come up with a product that can survive the day when iPhones are being offered on every carrier. Because I see no reason to believe that such a day will not come.
In the book "Marketing Warfare," Reis and Trout emphasize that a strategy should attack a competitor's strength, not its weakness.
Weaknesses will all be fixed over time, so attacking a weakness is simply making hay while the sun shines. Of course you should do it, but it shouldn't be a cornerstone of your strategy. It costs your competitor nothing to fix a weakness, they simply fix it and get better.
When you pick a competitor's strength and attack the strength, your competitor has a problem. Fixing the strength will cost them customers.
For example, it's a strength of Apple that they control the hardware and the software, so having Android run on multiple hardware devices from different vendors is attacking iPhone's strength, much as Windows attacks Macintosh's strength by running on commodity PCs.
Offering iPhone on other devices would cripple the user experience, so Apple can't respond without weakening itself. The AT&T deal, OTOH, is just a wekness. When it expires Apple loses nothing by offering iPhone through other carriers.
I'm guessing that had they given in to whatever the hell Verizon requested, and has no reason to discontinue requesting, you'd be looking at a much different phone. That's why I still don't believe we'll ever see a CDMA iPhone.
They did it because they thought they'd make more money that way, and maybe they did, and maybe they still will. Maybe they knew they'd sell 1/2 as many phones that way, but make 3x more per phone and therefore come out ahead, and maybe that math hasn't changed. Certainly AT&T will cling to the iPhone the way the Cavaliers will to LeBron.
Verizon doesn't need Apple. They'll steamroll AT&T with turds like the Blackberry Storm if they have to because they're far and away the best network in the U.S. and everybody loves them. Apple needs Verizon far more though, which means they won't get anywhere near the deal there they will from AT&T in terms of money, control, etc.
So if I had to bet (with someone who doesn't have insider info of course) I'd say we see continued exclusivity with AT&T. I wouldn't lay odds on it, but I'd take even money.
Neither Verizon nor Apple is stupid. If network choice really starts hurting the iPhone, which it isn't because iPhone sales are insane, then Apple will bend slightly to accommodate Verizon. If AT&T continues gaining Verizon users on virtue of the iPhone itself, then Verizon will look for a deal with Apple. The point of the ancestor post is that if your strategy to compete is "we're shittier but use a different network", then you aren't focused on the product, you're focused on making money. John Gruber is writing about product, not about market competition.
The exclusivity was about a lot more than visual voice mail. It had to do with sales channel and profits from ongoing contracts as well, which were probably far larger issues and ones Verizon has absolutely no reason to cave on. And my point was that it might be in both Verizon and Apple's best interest to not work together.
The network is a huge part of the product when it comes to phones. A phone that is constantly dropping calls, one of the iPhone's biggest complaints, or out of fast data range is an inferior product through no fault of its own. In the mobile industry by being on a better network you have a better product.
Nonetheless, the best and worst thing about capitalism is that inferior products win all the time when the salient point of competition isn't product "quality" as you're meaning it here. We in the tech industry love the idea of a Google or an Apple making a better mousetrap and slaying the entrenched competition, but the reality is that for every one story like that, there are 20 of a better product that died due to vendor lock-in, marketing, or some other form of differentiation. Apple's been on both sides of that equation.
I agree that part of a product is its network. However, neither Apple nor its competitors manufacture networks. It would be incredibly lazy to hope to make money solely because you use one third-party network rather than another. In this case I agree with you, it might work, but Gruber doesn't just want a phone that makes money. He wants a phone that competes.
Apple seems to like keeping their product lineups relatively simple. GSM tends to be the worldwide standard. Fracturing their product lineup for (generally speaking) one market doesn't sound like the sort of thing Apple would do. I imagine if Verizon was the major GSM network in the U.S.A., we'd see Verizon + Apple instead of AT&T + Apple.
Hint: it's a MiFi http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2009/05/13/verizon-mifi-2200-r...
I can go to Optus, Telstra, Vodaphone, Virgin, 3 - and get a subsidised phone (even free upfront). Or I can even go to http://www.apple.com/au/iphone/buy/ and buy one - and put in whatever random sim card I like.
While googling for this comment I found that palm are looking at releasing a gsm phone soon - that might change things - but for now - the iPhone has a major advantage in carriers - it's called GSM.
Most people can thumb-type just as well, if not better, on an iPhone as they could on a BlackBerry.
I prefer the iPhone to a Blackberry overall, but the argument that there is no advantage to typing on a Blackberry is just not true. Here's a better analysis:
As much as Apple mucks things up, it isn't without reason that Apple made the apps-in-foreground-only design decision and put so much effort into controlling what software goes on the device.
Unless the Android is going to be marketed to people who care to check which of their background processes has a bug and decides to eats up their battery every once in awhile, there's a big advantage to having apps "just work", even if distribution of those applications is a pain for developers.
1) getting as many possible people online with their cellphones searching the web & clicking ads,
2) stealing Windows Mobile market share,
3) and selling android apps to as many people as possible.
And I believe, in that order.
Besides, I like being able to replace batteries, sim cards, and sd cards on my g1.
edit:formatting/typo
With Microsoft signing a deal with Nokia to include Office into Nokia phones, and Nokia's announcement to ditch Symbian in favor of Maemo there's no room for somewhat outdated Windows Mobile.
Android, Apple, Maemo... there's already too many smart phone platforms to develop for. Since MS dropped the ball with their Mobile OS, They might try to adapt their strategy by partnering with Nokia and getting exclusive rights for some software groups (pre-installs) or some other deals. Most likely exclusive search engine deal.
The platform you need to beat in this plan is not the iPhone. It's the jailbroken iPhone. Make something that the real tech-heads and first adopters cheer, and they will be your beachhead. Do that, and you can get droves of the rest to follow you!
As usual, the hard part is not the idea, it's the execution.
I found myself agreeing with this statement strongly.
To say that 'a monoculture is not in the consumer's interest' make perfect sense, but why wouldn't Apple prefer a case where it has no strong competition? Their goal is profit via market share, not innovation for the sake of innovation.
By being forced to innovate, they (or a competitor) can drive consumption up by obsoleting the current wave of technology.
Anyway, I have an ethical problem with companies maximizing profits at the expense of doing anything useful. Why not innovate even when not necessary? You can call it R&D and not be blamed for wasting shareholders' money.
Apple's goal is making good products. If they wanted shitloads of cash, they could have sold out at any time in the last decade. Instead, they try to make things that people will love.
If Apple has no competitor, they'll continue to innovate, have no doubts. However, they might not innovate in all ways at once, meaning they might not focus on annihilating all their weaknesses. If they've got a competitor, suddenly there's incentive to beat their rivals in every way possible, and the resulting products are even better.
I immediately thought of MS Word when this sub-topic came up. Since establishing its dominance in, let's say 1997 or so, few features have come along that have truly changed the way that users word process (the last one for me was JIT spell checking). But MS has been adding more and more features in an attempt to continue innovating.
There's a Word monoculture and there's innovation of a sort. I think the interesting point that you make is that it's unfocused innovation that seems to be either incremental or aimed at preempting possible minor complaints, rather than exploring new ways for users to create documents. Not that I'm critiquing MS specifically of this—I think this may be a general symptom of monopoly (and I wonder if the same would hold for Apple).
I'm guessing that most people are reacting against my implication that Apple is primarily profit-driven rather than design-driven. I suppose this might be true (and probably is true of some pieces of the company), but I have trouble believing that their financial success is just a happy accident that follows naturally from their focus on design.
Or is there a different part you disagree with?
Apple's most successful products have been those where its best to market, rather than first to market, which by means competition is good for it by definition (most especially at the beginning). Creative Nomad and (soon at least) WinMo are evidence of that (on the other hand, there's Newton, which was way too early to market).
It remains to be seen whether or not their more successful products fall into a MS Word-like malaise (see my other comment) now that they're entrenched in the media player and smart phone spaces. My guess is that the design that has driven them to success in the past will continue to be able to head off competition, but I don't want to sound like a fan boy.
So mainly, I was disagreeing that a monoculture could be in their best interest. It may in certain cases (or other companies), but I don't think it does on average.
I wonder if all of these mini-controversies actually help Apple and the iPhone. It's another headline, another conversation piece, and like Gruber says, most / many people aren't all that unhappy with the App Store. The only reason they're stories and relevant in the first place is because of the iPhone's insane popularity -- the App Store rejection articles seem to further promote such instead of actually hurting it.
Is there any reason why some vendor cannot implement same multi-touch input on their hardware ? Is it strictly patented ?
The Palm Pre supports and uses multi-touch in the same manner as the iPhone.
It would seem that multi-touch isn't Apple's sole intellectual property, though they have IMO implemented it the best.
It's so frustrating when progress gets stuck against someone's greed.
I would actually argue that greed has driven the majority of progress over the last century.
Slick is superior. Having a phone that looks snappy and feels responsive is superior. It's not superior in a benchmark sense, perhaps, but nobody gives a fuck about benchmarks.
The Cocoa Touch libraries are excellent, as far as they go, drawing on a couple of decades of experience with Smalltalk-style UI code (NeXT and Cocoa); and, you're free to innovate on your own UI as far as you want to take it. Nothing in the way.
The OpenGL implementation (hardware itself & the software interface) is excellent, and just got much better with the 3GS.
Seems like they're moving from strength to strength, and I'm pretty cynical about these things.
In the meantime, though, I'm waiting for the Motorola Sholes. :) I just hope they don't mess that up.
On the other hand, there's a ton of space below that, and a ton of space to make Apple clamber ever higher up the value chain in order to capture the margins they want, keeping them out of the mainstream market.
Frankly, if the N97 only ran Android and had a better touch screen it'd do most of what this article recommends.
Here's the announcement: http://www.ftd.de/technik/it_telekommunikation/:Strategiewen...
The important point is that Nokia is adopting the Qt toolkit across the range. Both Symbian and Maemo will have Qt at the top of the stack by 2011. At that point, the underlying operating system won't be particularly relevant to application developers anymore: C++ software written to Qt (with the upcoming Orbit touch UI framework) will be just a recompile away from being ported to Symbian.
They denied the "announcement" made in that article: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090812-702406.html?mg=...
I have been thinking for a year that Android would catch up, but I still don't see real signs.
Why do you think that is? The sense I get from people interested in iPhone dev is that they think they'll make good coin from their apps.
Also, I hate Java--though it has GC, it's still basically a static language, and horribly verbose to boot.