iPhone vs Android

You must live on Bizzaro World.

Licensing OS 9 to people who were making Mac clones was one of the worst decisions Apple ever made. It almost bankrupted the company.

They’ve got tons of competition now, and they’ve always had tons of competition. Apple computer sales make up a small percentage of the total market (hardware) and Windows obviously sells a hell of a lot more copies than OS X (software). The only sub-market where Apple sells more than anybody else is in notebooks, and even there they aren’t dominant, they just have a much bigger slice of that particular market than they do in other markets.

The iPod was far from the first digital music player to market. It has the majority market share now, but when it debuted sales were miniscule compared to the rest of the offerings out there. It took 3 years for sales to really take off. Its current position is due to good design — which is not really separable from good usability, IMO — integration with a good program for managing music, iTunes, which also serves as the portal to the most successful outlet for legally purchased electronic music files to date, the iTunes music store.

It is still not an uncontested market. Amazon opened a pretty successful music file store, that may do quite well against iTunes in the future. Other manufacturers continue to try to outdo the iPod in features. I think the high of the iPod market was a bit over 80% a year or so ago; it has fallen a bit since then.

With the release of the iPhone, Apple took on long-established cell phone manufacturers and software developers and made a product that made those old timers look embarrassingly bad in comparison. Analysts and industry professionals frankly expected Apple to fail because the competition was so tough. These guys didn’t even realize how strong the public response would be for it. The continuing good sales pretty much prove that it wasn’t just fanboyism and hype either.

The exclusive deal with AT&T (actually Cingular at the time) was probably not what Apple wanted. They’d already shopped around a bit looking for a company that would give them enough control over the back end that they could do things like visual voice mail. If you watched any keynote speeches or read interviews with Jobs about the deal, you can tell that he’s not all that enthusiastic about having to be tied to AT&T as a condition for getting the iPhone out there. I really don’t think they had a choice about it. The exclusivity contract was clearly a huge concession they had to make to get the thing done at all.

The vetting system for installed software is probably in both AT&T’s best interest and Apple’s. Carriers have already had problems with malware and they’re taking steps to head off future issues. Apple has a lot invested in this product, and a reputation for reliability, security, and ease of use.

I would prefer that development be more open than what was announced at the SDK release conference, but completely open software installations do pose some risk for them. Currently, though, no smartphone OS allows completely unrestricted installations.

Not that restrictions matters much. There are any number of cracks and exploits already for the iPhone. if you want to do them. But at least if you do that, you’re not going to be able to blame Apple for any problems.

I hope Android does well. Comparing Android to the iPhone is a little like comparing Windows and OS X though. They’re not exactly equivalent, though they’re sorta-kinda similar in some ways. From a security standpoint, Google is going to have to have some kind of vetting process just like Symbian or Windows Mobile has. IT people have already been bugging them for more details on how they’re going to do that.

The problem that Android has is what all the open source projects have: lack of focus. It’s a system developed by committee, and I think the only way it will be really successful is if a small group of people at Google are ultimately responsible for what things are adopted and what are dropped from the mainstream releases of it. Even at this point, the capabilities and development path of Android software are pretty vague. It’s still clearly a work in progress.

IPhone while a very nice device has less than 1% marketshare. May rise to 3 times that.

Android or Linux variants are going to take over because of Nokia and SonyEricsson aversion to windows and other possibilities havent worked to well for them in the past. My prediction.

Other players are fringe.

I am currently working on an entry for the Android Challenge and participate in the groups for it. Here is the thread over there about rivalry between Android and iPhone. The gist of it is - people who’ve bought into android think apple’s SDK will fail because:
[ul]the draconian(30%) cut apple bites out of the income(this forces you into developing a commercial application)
having to use c++ instead of java
Not being able to run processes in the background
Having your app evaluated by “experts” at apple before you can make it available to anyone
[/ul]
For me personally Android is the future because it costs nothing to develop for it, and I get to use most of the incredibly useful stuff available in Java 6 with it. I’ll start a thread about my contest entry once I have something solid to show off to you guys.

The problem with your logic is that it doesn’t recognize that iPhone 3.0 will be coming out around the same time as Android will be debuting while the iPhone will have probably twice as many units on the market. It might handle background processes by then and have 32 gigs of memory.

The rest of your points seem sound, but this seems a bit backwards to me. How can a revenue share force you to charge?
Surely if price->0 then apples cut->0 as well, or are they going to charge a minimum amount per download or whatever?

I’m one of the biggest Mac fanboys around, but I’m trying to regain my composure after reading through the TOS for the iPhone SDK. I want to start porting my Palm applications over to the iPhone platform, and have applied to Apple to be able to pay them $99 to be able to dowload my software to my own phone, but what if they don’t let me? I’m a little deflated here. I can see their perspective – not wanting to flood the market with so many crappy apps that the iPhone starts being associated with ‘instability,’ but they need to work out something better than what they have right now.

Still, I’m a hobbyist, and (ultimately) code is code, so if an Android platform comes out that’s even half as good as the iPhone, but that I can install my own software on, I’ll ditch the iPhone and pick up an Android platform. I’ve seen Apple shoot itself in the foot before, and it’s entirely possible they’re doing it again.

Now you’ve got me distracted while I start playing with the Android SDK. Are you happy now? I was supposed to start working on my taxes this weekend…

Check out my project if you need some reasonably well commented examples of client - server interaction, responsive ui design, progress bars as a listview component, the maps api and a somewhat consistent adherence to MVC. Oh and please let me know if you get JUnit running in M5-RC15, I just can’t seem to get it.

:smack: You are right. I don’t know if apple is gonna charge a base fee to have your app delivered to people, but as long as they don’t, non-commercial products won’t be impacted. I’m still not gonna participate in any cause I hate apple’s guts.