Android > iPhone

I’ve been involved with mobile application development (and mobile “related” development) for about a year and a half now – specifically for iPhones (admittedly because they ARE popular along with the tens of millions of iPod touches in the wild).   Today, I made a switch (mostly as a statement) to an Android phone (specifically the Droid) after having squatted on an iPhone for the past year or so.  I’ve been watching Android from the sidelines for quite sometime and am excited about taking the plunge.

The iPhone app store has over 100,000 apps and over 200 more are approved every day.  That’s a lot of apps.  What’s amazing is how many are in the app store in spite of Apple’s nothing-short-of-ridiculous and erratic app review and approval methodology. Take for instance today’s story on Techcrunch describing Apple’s approval of the Mein Kampf app with the Nazi Swastika as the app icon.  I had been trying to get an app discovery app called Apps-a-lot approved by Apple for weeks only to find it rejected on grounds that the iTunes Store not be crawled.  Except, AppSniper and BargainBin continue to stay available after mention by Apple app review staffers that they would be “dealt with” for employing similar practices.  As a developer, this is nothing less than disconcerting and I write more about this here.

Apple releases features in a “drip campaign” fashion.  They intentionally decide to cripple products with features and choose for horizontal sort of innovation over vertical.  This means taking a product like a mouse and turning it into a touch surface.  Is this groundbreaking?  In a way, yes.  But, it serves a different purpose to Apple by encouraging behavioral change one that users succumb to and then strongly defend largely because they can’t believe that the motive by Apple be ulterior in any way (true fan people).  An example of Apple crippling a product – not allowing video recording with the first two versions of the iPhone.   I equate this strategy to the release by labels of songs on an album in controlled succession taking advantage of “cd sale waves” – I remember when Red Hot Chili Peppers released Californication and the songs came out one by one after being burnt to death in airplay.  Apple is waiting to ride out the current 3GS craze and follow up with the next magical feature – simultaneous app support (and when they do, they’ll claim that it’s what you NEED to have and that they somehow discovered it when it’s been out for quite some time now).

The Droid is a computer that can do N things at the same time. The iPhone can do all of one thing at one time with the only exception being play music (due to its iPod touch origins).  The main reason Apple did this was to be efficient at memory management – specifically with leaks.  C does not manage memory very well with java as historically had garbage collection and stronger memory management.   To ensure that the user experience for the one application that was running would never be compromised by another running simultaneously, Apple decided to implement a “one app running”  at any time.  So, what if you wanted to chat, check a tweet or email and then come back to the chat session?  With Apple, you really are SOL – even with clumsy push notification solutions that are out there.  What do you think those kids with their Sidekicks and flip phones are doing in the mall food court glued to their screens?  Surely not sitting within one single app!  But again I tell you, Apple WILL release this and call it the greatest invention since…video recording.

What is sucky (and I’m hoping this will change) is that companies that have web portals for their services (banks and other subscription services) have solid or above implementations of a native iPhone app but no counterpart for Android.  This is probably due to the shared platform between iPhones and iPod touches.  There are 10M+ iPhones but then another 50M iPod touches out there. There has been a strong chicken/egg problem here since the launch of the Android platform.  It wasn’t “serious” enough to put development resources towards – while iPhones surfed on the existing popularity of the iPod touch.  In other words, it was easier to “boot” for Apple than for Google.  Dial back further in history and iTunes and linked credit cards made this even more serendipitous for Apple (though some would claim that this is far from serendipity and was all part of Steve Jobs’ super master plan for world domination).

A word about the Droid – it really is a “man’s phone”.  From the brush metal feel to the default sound effects.  That being said, I think the iPhone is largely a “woman’s phone” (and originally catered to the metrosexuality of men to get launched off the ground).  Lofty statement I know but I think on a subconscious level, the iPhone is so appealing due to its shiny, glossy backside and virtual shininess in the beveling of the icons/buttons. It just feels so damn…sexy the same way a Porsche Cayman does.  In fact, I think all said and done, this is really want drives iPhone growth – an innate sense of “I want one of those too” when looking over at the person next to you and seeing the shiny object with big square Playskool-like buttons sliding across the screen.  Slap a shiny backside to an Android phone, increase the size of icons on the Dashboard by about 15% and a little glossy effect, and there might be an Android phone that will have the “ooh” factor just the same – except then Apple would get litigation busy, I think.