Why is Google Android losing the battle against Apple iPhone?
I was thinking about Android from the lines of a developer. It is superior in all aspects over the iPhone.
1) The SDK is available on all platforms – windows, linux, mac. Unlike the iPhone SDK, where you have to own a Mac to be able to develop applications for the iPhone
2) The cost of admission to the developer program of Android is a fourth the cost of admission to the iPhone developer program. $25 as compared to $99.
3) I don’t suppose Google has strict rules governing the functionality of the apps published on the market as compared to Apple. Apple imposes a lot of restrictions on apps released on its app store, such as it should not replace the iPod music application etc. There are a lot of functionalities that Apple wants to expose through its own apps only and not through user created apps. Google imposes no such rules.
4) Apps on Android are much easier to code than on iPhone. Android uses Java and the Java developer community would easily outnumber the community of Objective-C developers that program for iPhone.
Still, iPhone sales rakes in number much much greater than all Android phones put together. iPhone apps are much more smarter and nicer than the best Android apps out there. I just don’t understand why this is the case.
I think the reason that iPhone and Apple are doing so well is that it is a premium product. People want to stand out owning an Apple product. An Android device can be purchased by anyone and everyone. They are available on all networks, locked and unlocked. Every other manufacturer are releasing Android phone or are publishing news about pending phone releases. People are confused for choice, not spoilt for one. There is nothing premium about an Android phone. Apple on the other hand played a master stroke by tying up with a provider. They became exclusive. The phones were available on a contract. Outright purchase was extremely high, but people could be part of a movement by buying the phone at a subsidized rate. And no one else made phones with the iPhone OS.
Google on the other hand tried to capture the market of developers and open source enthusiasts. They released a half-baked OS so that the developers could start working on them and created apps which would be already available by the time a mature OS hit the market. However, this half-baked OS was also purchased by many non-geeks and regular phone users who found the OS was not that feature filled, especially when compared to the Symbians and Flash-based OSes in the market. This lead to some bad publicity and Google lost part of the race with this move.
I think Google would have made Android an awesome hit, had it launched the Nexus One as its first publicly available Android phone and had exclusive rights to the Android platform for at least 6 months to 1 year. Once the phone had become something of an exclusive item, then could have gone open and mass market with it. For now they have set their feet wrong on all c0unts and Apple is clearly running away with the advantage.
also, android wasn’t a pure google product. it was taken over a year or so before the 1.0 release. so, in a way, goog had to deal with code already written – good or bad. although reuse does sound easy, re-factoring code is generally an evolving process. add to that, OS isn’t really google’s core dominance. apple used a “lite” version of osx – code they have known for years now. so on a developer’s perspective, that adds too.
No, it was not Google’s product. Android was a collaboration, agreed. But it was of course the brainchild of Google. It might not have been pitted head on against iPhone, but I feel that it should have. Otherwise it is just another project running loose in the market. In order that something be successful, it had to be a movement. Gentoo was a movement, but it never gathered much steam, coz well, it was fun, it was nice, but no one really pushed it. Ubuntu and its flavours on the other hand, had the drive. It was propagated, it was pitted against Windows, it was pitted against other Linuxes, and it is now the Linux with the biggest user base.
As a techie and as a developer, I want Android to do well and have a wide acceptance, but no one from the Open Handset Alliance seems to be doing anything about this.
and on a related note, android gained the most during the last quarter (?). the droid campaign was mighty successful. don’t think google expected too many numbers from n1.
I think Google was banking a lot on the success of the N1. They needed to grab the market in order to make the Android a success. If more laymen don’t accept it, then the OS will die with the geeks.