Daring Fireball: Pound the Quality

If you look at the way the Android SDK handles device differences, it's really much less of an issue that most people seem to make it out to be. Accommodating different resolutions, for example, is pretty trivial for an Android app developer. The only (IMHO) that might be an issue is the differences in input capabilities (ie, hardware keyboard or no hardware keyboard, trackball or no trackball, etc). That should no be an issue at all for productivity apps, but I do see how it could be an issue for games. It's hard to balance your level difficulties and design your play mechanics if you're not sure what kind of input device your players will be using.

Hmmm, there are several very significant differences between the two situations though:

- open hardware was critical to the success of the PC platform, allowing functionality such as ethernet, better video, changing disk drive configurations etc. In the mobile phone world, the hardware is locked down for all players.

- computer interface devices (screens, keyboards, mice, touchpads) have all been designed to optimise for ease of use. In the case of mobile phones, the interface devices have been optimised for small size. Concretely this means that both input and output are difficult - writing useable software that runs on two screens with different aspect ratios is a momentous task on a mobile phone, having to allow for the existance or not of a physical keyboard or multitouch screen, same thing. What this means is that a diffuse hardware platform, such as Android is offering, is going to be very difficult to develop high quality apps on. Unless hardware manufacturers can agree on a common platform, this problem is only going to increase. Of course, such a common hardware platform doesn't seem terribly likely to me, as the example of the PC industry shows that this approach quickly reduces manufacturers to commodity providers, with razor thin margins. I suspect that the Samsungs and Motarolas of the world are in no hurry to go there..

- Apple never had the dominance in the computer market that they currently have in the smartphone market - they never got over about 14% of the market with the Mac (although if it continues it's current trajectory, we may see this level beaten in the not too distant future). In the smartphone market however, they are well above this level of marketshare already, and still rising. If you add in iPod Touch sales, the platform is massacring everybody out there.

- At the time when Apple lost market share, home computers were only a small part of the market compared to office computers. Purchasing departments have a strong preference for cheap over quality, provided that a minimum level has been achieved. Consumers are far more discerning. In the mobile world, personal sales are more important than business sales, or to say it another way, you are more likely to have a personal mobile phone than a work phone. All of this acts to reduce one avenue of attack on the iPhone platform - you probably aren't going to be able to win just by doing things cheaper - you're going to have to do things better too.

- phones are far more mission-critical than PCs. If your computer breaks/starts functioning weirdly, you aren't too badly affected. If your phone goes down these days, it's a disaster. There is going to be a premium on reliability, and it remains to be seen as to whether the Android platform can deliver that reliability when there are numerous hardware manufacturers, and a large uncontrolled application base.

There are other differences, but I think these are the important ones. Globally I find these differences big enough that I'm dubious as to the validity of using the PC experience as a guide to the future of the smartphone market.

Thanks for that link! I'd always thought Apple crashed sales-wise in the 90s. I stand quite corrected.

Monoculture, Apple branding and Apple control. I'm not that these things missing on Android are bad thing, though.

The iPhone's got Apple's ridiculous attention to detail. It does small things right that are thoughtful beyond any level of attention Google can afford Android, not just because Google's never been capable of matching Apple in design quality but because Apple, unlike Google, controls their hardware.

What that means is that Apple's allowed to get away with certain things. They can create programs reliant on certain hardware features in the iPhone because they know it'll be there on every phone. They can rely on a high-quality multitouch screen, a certain virtual keyboard set-up that works very well, and a particular screen size that never changes.

What that means is developers don't have to hedge bets. They can go all-out with their designs, knowing that what they see designing is going to be what every iPhone user gets. They can create a design perfectly suited to the iPhone's dimensions and processes, ignoring any possibility that that screen size will be any different or that the phone's functionality will be lacking certain features or a certain high quality. So you have a lot of apps that blow Android applications away, because the developers are so free to be wild.

The one that I think about the most is Weightbot, which has a custom UI that mimics a hard steel door, has a single narrow band that scrolls through days/weight, and which, when rotated, "opens" the door at its seams to reveal what's behind it. That's a design that requires the iPhone, because you'd have to be insane to make a narrow band that requires ultrafluid touch controls on an OS where you don't know how good the touch controls on every phone will be. You couldn't possibly design the app to fit the screen so well, to use the law of thirds like it does to position every control pixel-perfect, to have a major feature rely on tilt-control, or even to have that sliding-out graphic, which takes a knowledge of how it will look on the screen.

You could make an application similar to Weightbot on Android. It wouldn't work as well, it wouldn't look as good, and it would have to compromise its elegance to make sure it worked correctly across all phones. You'd spend a lot more time hunting for bugs. You wouldn't have access to the gorgeous interface design that Apple gives developers out-of-the-box to make apps look iPhone-y. You miss out on a lot of elegance, in other words, because unlike iPhone, Android is not designed to be an elegant product.