I just completed reading a 3 pages article on AppleInsider and this gave me a different perspective on Android. Prince McLean thinks Google created Android as a Windows Mobile killer to safeguard its own advertising and search market, not to compete with the iPhone. And he has some evidence you should check out.
Some of the things I’ve learned I could not believe. But I do trust the source. If you have the time, check out the original. But if you’re more in a rush, here is a summary for you.
Apple’s iPhone App Store and Google’s Android Marketplace are widely considered to be the two most viable mobile software platforms today. Apple boasts a library of more than 100,000 iPhone apps while Google counts around 11,000 apps for Android; both stores are growing rapidly. However, long before Apple and Google first announced their plans back in late 2007 to create mobile platform Software Development Kits for the iPhone and Android phones, a series of smartphones with their own SDKs had existed for more than half a decade.
Symbian, Palm OS and Windows Mobile have been marketed to both users and developers and software platforms capable of running across multiple mobile operating systems have also existed for years, such Java ME (J2ME) by Sun, Flash Lite, and BREW by Qualcomm. RIM’s BlackBerry and Danger’s Sidekick run specialized Java ME softwar, LG created Flash Lite phones and Verizon phones use the BREW platform to rent game applets through the “Get It Now” service.
Considering how long these various alternatives for creating and selling mobile software have existed, it may seem puzzling that Apple’s App Store was able to make such an immediate and profound impact on the mobile software business. In order for Google’s Android (or any other aspiring platform) to catch up to and surpass the iPhone App Store, it will have to figure out what has worked in Apple’s favor and what has resulted in the failure of other earlier platforms.
What are the reasons behind Apple’s success?
Some of the reasons are Apple’s robust development tools, the market buzz and media attention it receives, and it’s been the first in its field to create a seamless experience for the users to download and install Apps.
It is critically important to generate excitement around a platform, and both iPhone and Android have created lots of buzz. However, Apple has targeted its buzz at iPod users and retail consumers and its own Mac OS X developer base, while Google’s buzz has largely been confined to developers and open source advocates.
Google is not advertising Android as a brand name. In contrast, Apple now has everyone from broadcast networks to insurance companies to newspapers to rival music services prominently advertising their apps for the iPhone and its App Store within iTunes.
Apple’s App Store builds upon experience and previous successes: iPod games were sold on a small scale through iTunes. Apple almost invented the micropayments based business for music and video in iTunes. Apple also built on Mac OS X as a desktop platform, releasing development tools that were both mature and familiar to a large number of coders.
Additionally, the company delivered what the iPhone could reasonably achieve. Apple launched the iPhone a full year before launching the SDK and the App Store, building up an installed user base of about 5 million users. Once it opened the store, it could unleash a flood of new software and new buyers, creating a tidal wave of positive coverage.
As important as what Apple did was what it did not do. The company didn’t announce all of its future plans in advance, didn’t attempt to instantly achieve feature parity with existing smartphone platforms at launch, and didn’t allow third parties to set expectations or minimum standards for its own platform’s software titles. Instead, the company frequently surprised users with positive news of new features, deflected comparisons by focusing on the platform’s strengths, and carefully guarded how its App Store library developed.
In retrospect, the company clearly made the right decisions. Apple kept its new store perpetually in the headlines with a series of status announcements at regular intervals; focused on the unique value it was adding to the mobile experience and on the ease of use of its device successfully avoiding direct comparisons with existing smartphones, and maintained control over its App Store to keep up its reputation. While Apple is criticized for exerting too much control over its App Store, the truth is that there are no real malware problems and there are many quality apps at very reasonable prices.
Google keeps much less control over content or presentation for apps listed in Android Market. This lack of restriction has brought Android to become a great place to experiment, not the place where developers go to make money.
App Store approval process means better security
On the iPhone all software is being only available through a trusted source, co-signed by the developer and Apple as trusted parties. If an app does something wrong, Apple can pull it from the store and potentially shut it down remotely by revoking the developer’s certificate. Apps can’t install in the background and do things the user is unaware of after the app has been quit.
Google allows developers to “self-sign apps”… anyone can sign their own malicious app. Android developers can also deliver their own apps from any source, so Google has no way to stop the sale of malicious code or to remotely deactivate apps. Android programs can continue to run in the background and do virtually anything without users even being aware they are running.
The weird thing is that Google’s Chrome OS takes a stronger position in security, relegating all “apps” to run in sandboxes within the browser, and simply disallowing alternative apps. This model is much closer to the iPhone’s, which similarly sandboxes apps. While Chrome OS simply distrusts all web apps it runs, the iPhone OS accords limited trust based on encrypted signatures. Android currently does neither, although it will likely move more toward the Chrome OS.
Apple created the iPhone to use only one new modern API: its mobile-optimized flavor of Cocoa. It simply gave developers no option to string along Carbon, Java, Flash, or other old API alternatives for building any new mobile applications. Google introduced Android as a modified Java platform. It’s now in the process of rolling out a native SDK for accessing the core OS. This means developers will have two official APIs from Google to weigh for advantages and disadvantages. Additionally, Google is supporting the development of runtimes to host Flash apps and Mono/.NET applications. This will enable Android to “run more code” at the expense of anyone needing to develop software expressly for Android.
In addition to efforts to block malware, Apple’s security system for iPhone apps also greatly limits casual theft. This results in a broad, viable commercial market for iPhone apps of all kinds, supporting the high volume sale of software priced very low. Mobile developers have previously needed to set their app prices significantly higher in efforts to get something from the minority of users who actually pay. By spreading costs equally among all users, Apple has created a software store where users reward innovative development with dollars. In contrast, RIM and Microsoft have encouraged higher price points for software in their respective stores, hoping this will benefit developers. At this point, it only discourages users from buying new apps.
Today’s Android hardware will not run tormorrow’s Android
Android users hope that Google’s openness (including allowing unsigned software from any source to run in the background) will result in a broader, more varied mobile software market than Apple’s. This certainly has enabled Android to pick up the efforts of developers who can’t sell their software to iPhone users due to Apple’s rules. However, the already fractionalized market for Android apps is becoming more and more divided as vendors release phones with unique features that tug at developer’s attentions.
As new Android phones are released with new versions of Android that last year’s phones can’t install, the installed base of Android will fail to compound. A key facet to Apple’s App Store success is that virtually all apps run on any model of iPhone ever sold, not to mention the iPod touch. The continuing effort in differentiating smartphone features among Android hardware makers will not help the overall installed base. Instead, the modern installed base will keep resetting to zero, just as Windows Mobile repeatedly did as new versions appeared which only worked on new phones.
Moreover, all commercial apps for Android phones currently have to fit into the 256MB of onboard storage (512MB on the Droid), a limit in both phone design and in Android software. Since Android itself uses up most of this memory (the 512MB Droid has about 200MB free after loading Android 2.0) this limits users to theoretically installing a maximum of 20 apps at around 10MB each. That’s a pretty severe limitation, but a ridiculous roadblock for games that are anything more than doodle puzzles.
Android vs iPhone OS as a gaming platform
Android users can usually pop in an SD card and add as much storage capacity as a high end iPhone (16 to 32GB), but Android Market doesn’t allow apps to be stored in this Flash card RAM storage because doing so would require additional layers of security to prevent widespread theft. It would also raise issues for users who swap out different SD cards. Google is still working out its strategy for using the SD Card storage that Windows Mobile phones provide as a preference to onboard storage.
Android supporters like to compare the iPhone to devices like the Motorola Droid and conclude that both have similar amounts of RAM installed. The problem is that there are critical differences how that RAM is used by the operating system and how much of it is available for things the user wants to do. In reality, the Droid not only has less RAM available but also has only a tiny fraction of the iPhone’s onboard storage RAM that’s needed to load apps and games. Specification comparisons never point this out.
Note that storage RAM is used to hold applications and content (much like a PC hard drive). When launched, an app is loaded into the separate system RAM, where it runs along with the operating system. Android phones lack much functional storage RAM, but also end up with less available system RAM because Android 2.0 typically consumes more of the standard 256MB of system RAM than iPhone 3.0.
The reality is that no matter how many Android phones Google’s partners can introduce in 2010, Android 2.0 will never be a gaming platform and the vast majority of these phones (including all current models) will simply never be able to play any advanced games. If Google solves this issue sometime in the future, it will only apply to future Android phones, again lopping off everything that already exists into the waste bin of erased installed base and starting its competitive clock against the iPhone back to zero.
The result is that Android Market isn’t just a smaller version of the App Store. It’s more like a free rummage sale compared to an actual retail store. One has products people want at market prices, the other offers eccentric stuff that people are offering to give away. It’s pretty hard to slowly evolve a rummage sale into a serious retail operation. In 2010, users who sample Android Market aren’t going to begin throwing around money to induce serious development; they’re going to either abandon the platform or give up on serious third party software and become shareware hobbyists, just as desktop Linux PC users have done over the past decade.
The result of these very different stores isn’t just evident in what’s for sale. It’s also reflected in who buys what. A report from AdMob in August said that “iPhone and iPod touch users are twice as likely to purchase paid apps than Android users,” and found that iPod touch users downloaded 80% more apps that smartphone users.
What are Google’s plans for Andoird?
It’s not clear Google has any interest in becoming a strong mobile platform leader; currently, it looks like Google expects hardware makers to figure things out for themselves, and for third party developers to simply flock to its platform and invest significant commercial efforts in a hobbyist marketplace where security and theft are not really enforced, where customers don’t buy as much, and where there’s far fewer customers but far greater difference between phone sets for developers to account for when they build apps.
That means more work for developers, less reward, and less likelihood of future profit and success. No wonder why gaming legend John Carmack told CNBC earlier this month that while he was excited about the prospects of the iPhone, “I have mixed feelings about Android. I’ve got a warm feeling about the open source model, but a lot of the things that make Linux not-so-wonderful seem to be there in Android. On the iPhone, you know everyone on that device [has the same functionality and hardware], while on Android, you’re across the board on a number of different things.”
Carmack added, “the [Android] marketplace is also apparently not well handled. And from what I hear, nobody’s making a lot of money on these [Android titles].”
Until Google focuses on Android third party apps, no amount of advertising and hardware partners and phone models will enable it to be competitive with the iPhone.