When buying a smartphone, I know a lot of people who have chosen Android phones over the iPhone. The arguments for their choice were varied, and over the past year (since the availability of the iPhone on networks other than AT&T) there has only been one person who was able to give me what I considered to be a convincing reason for doing so (being a graphic designer, she wanted to be exposed to other design aesthetics).
Full disclosure here, I am an Apple fan (as if you didn’t know) and a stock holder. That being said, I’m not so ignorant as to not be able to recognize good technologies from companies other than Apple. I think Windows Phone is a really good and interesting mobile OS, and found it really well designed the couple of times I’ve had a chance to play with one. In fact, I find it superior to Android, and am perplexed at it’s lack of traction and can only chalk it up to their late start.
There are several reasons that I think the iPhone is a better purchase for people than Android phones. The number one reason is software. Not the number of Apps available – I find this argument disingenuous, as there were years in the 90’s when Windows users held up the number of apps available for their systems, and the counter argument was that while the Mac platform had less software available, it was generally of higher caliber. When I say software, I am referring to the Operating System; iOS for iPhone and Android (pick your favorite dessert) for android phones. My problem with Android is how slowly the newest OS from Google gets distributed to new or existing phones.
Yesterday Apple released an update to their iOS software for their mobile devices. Today, my 21 month old phone is running that software. I know of no Android phone, save the occasional Google Nexus, that gets this kind of quick software update. Late last year Michael Degusta wrote an article titled Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support. He made a graph which demonstrated how far behind most Android phones are in running the most current operating system, if at all (Motorola seems to have a particularly bad track record). Some of his results:
• 7 of the 18 Android phones never ran a current version of the OS.
• 12 of 18 only ran a current version of the OS for a matter of weeks or less.
• 10 of 18 were at least two major versions behind well within their two year contract period.
• 11 of 18 stopped getting any support updates less than a year after release.
• 13 of 18 stopped getting any support updates before they even stopped selling the device or very shortly thereafter.
• 15 of 18 don’t run Gingerbread, which shipped in December 2010.
• In a few weeks, when Ice Cream Sandwich comes out, every device on here will be another major version behind.
• At least 16 of 18 will almost certainly never get Ice Cream Sandwich.
Let me reiterate: Yesterday Apple released an update to their iOS software for their mobile devices. Today, my 21 month old phone is running that software.
This week another blogger, Frasier Spears, wrote a great post that reflects many of my own feelings on Android. But his take on the disadvantages of being behind on one or more OS releases was something I hadn’t considered before:
The Android platform is currently stuck in second gear because Google, their OEMs and the carriers can’t, won’t or simply have no incentive to get the installed base past the Android 2.x API set. There are better and more powerful APIs in Android 4, and there will be better ones again in the future, but developers can’t take advantage of them because almost nobody is running the latest OS.
For example, Google recently shipped Chrome for Android which, by all accounts, is a pretty great mobile web browser. Unfortunately, it requires Android 4 and around 1% of the installed base is currently running that release.
This means that iOS apps are not only better than Android apps today, they’re getting better faster than Android apps because Apple is deploying, and the installed base is rapidly upgrading to, much more powerful APIs on the devices in consumers’ hands.
Another reason I hear people give for choosing Android over iPhone is they’re dislike of Apple’s requirement to vet every App before making it available in it’s App Store. I can understand where some people may have a philosophical issue with this, but really, unless you’re a developer, this should not have a significant impact on your smartphone experience. Again, Spears has a great point about this concerning the slow adoption of operating system upgrades:
There are problems with security on Android. Roughly speaking, they fall into the categories of security exploits and malware. Every platform has security exploits – heck, the very basis of iOS jailbreaking is finding security holes to exploit – but the incidence of malware is not evenly spread.
One of the claimed strengths of the Android platform is the ability to download software from anywhere and install it on your device. No gatekeeper! No walled garden! That’s a perfectly valid thing to aspire to.
I take the claimed importance of this at face value: if you want it, I assume you’re planning to actually use it. If you’re going to download and install apps from all over the web, you had better be sure that the base OS is bang up to date with security patches.
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