After this week’s announcement of the T-Mobile G1, and the unveiling of the first final version of Android, I began to collect my thoughts on this new OS and how it would be able to compete in the market.
Let’s just say that Apple isn’t going to lose any sleep over this one.
While it seems that Android is riddled with problems for devs to solve, that’s not to say that it doesn’t have any really good ideas. It does! So let’s start off with the good.
If the iPhone didn’t exist, this would easily be the most advanced mobile OS on the market. It blows away Palm OS and Windows Mobile with ease. The touch interface, while not yet able to take advantage of multi-touch, is fast and smooth. The “drawer” idea, where you pull out your drawer of applications from the bottom of the screen, is a brilliant way to store what will likely become a large number of applications. Similarly you can pull out your notifications drawer from the top of the screen to look at your missed calls, texts, etc. This leaves your desktop (palmtop?) free for widgets like clocks, photos, and shortcuts to apps you need right away. While the UI isn’t gorgeous (yet), it is certainly quick and responsive, and gets the job done. Once developers are really able to get their hands dirty with the OS, and you see companies like HTC start to make android phones that look and act more like the HTC Touch HD, you’ll start to see a marked improvement with the OS.
Sounds great so far, right? So what’s wrong with Android? Unfortunately, quite a bit at the moment.
Like I said before, if the iPhone didn’t exist, it would easily be the most advanced mobile OS. Unfortunately for Google, the iPhone does INDEED exist, and it’s already well into it’s second generation of OS and devices. This puts Google in the unfortunate position of having to play catch up. One problem here, is that in terms of releasing a finished phone, the OS doesn’t seem quite done yet. In fact, a lot of the groundwork of the device is being left for developers to patch up over the coming months. As of now, the OS doesn’t have a dedicated media playing application. While you can purchase music straight from Amazon’s MP3 store, and play them on the device, that media player doesn’t play video. So Google is relying on 3rd party developers to write a video player for the phone.
In fact it seems like Google is relying on carriers and 3rd party developers to polish the OS in general. Which means in 2-3 years after a bunch of Android devices have finally hit the market, we may finally see a mature OS show up.
But that doesn’t yet solve the biggest problem facing Android, and I don’t think anything will. The problem is that Android is being designed to run on ANY phone, from the lowest flip phone, to a high end powerhouse smartphone. So how do all these third party developers make sure that they’re giant, really cool, GPS enabled apps will work on a tiny flip phone with no GPS? They can’t. As of now Google has only released the specs for developing on the G1. There is a good chance that any app developed with that platform in mind may not run correctly or at all on other lesser devices.
Once Android is bundled with many phones, the Android App Market is going to splinter and fall apart if developers have to write specific versions of each app for just about every phone that is released. Either that, or developers will start writing apps for the lowest common denominator of devices, in the hope that the simplest and smallest of apps will run on every device. Unfortunately that causes the developers to sacrifice cool features and functionality for compatibility.
Of course that’s not all. The open nature of the Android App Market means that anyone can upload anything. There is no oversight as to what app you can or can not write. The possibilities for malicious apps are tremendous. There’s nothing that says that you cant write a really cool game that everyone will download, that will dig into the browser history and contacts list, and transfer them to a third party in the background. The possibilites for identity theft are mindblowing, especially if people use the web-browser to pay a bill, or to order online.
The reason the iPhone App Store works so well (despite the controversies), is that the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPhone 3g all share a similar hardware profile. Apps written for one are compatible with all. It even elegantly scales, for example If you have a GPS , the GPS functions are activated, if not, it uses WiFi or cell signals to determine location. Compatibility is perfect, at least for now. One could imagine the day where you might need a newer generation of iPhone with bigger and better hardware to run an especially complicated game, but that’s still in the future, and I have a feeling the App Store would let you know that you can’t run the app, rather than letting you download it and having the phone crash.
While the Apple App Store may be causing problems with some developers, and they should be addressed, the inclusion of the App Store kill switch will make sure that if any sort of malicious app makes its way onto phones, that Apple can kill it remotely, lessening the amount of damage it could possibly do.
While we’re complaining about Apple, they really are taking a stance that focuses on our ease of use and our security. Once the first major Android spyware or malicious app infects people, I have a feeling that people will look at Apple’s strategy in a much less harsh light.
So if Android isn’t something for Apple to worry about now, will it be in the future? I think after 2-3 years of heavy development, and the release of Android on multiple devices we will be able to get a much better view of how Android is looking overall as an OS. One thing is for sure though, while Apple shouldn’t be quaking in their boots, Microsoft should. I have a feeling that if Android does anything, it will put Windows Mobile out of business.
Tags:
Android,
Apple,
Google,
iPhone 3g,
Microsoft,
Windows Mobile 
