Waiting for more data on the iPhone vs Android phones
March 9th, 2009 | by elisabeth | Published in Future of the Internet | 1 Comment
—by Elisabeth Oppenheimer
In several of the posts on this blog, we’ve talked about how we’ll be waiting to see how Apple’s semi-open model competes with Android’s mostly-open model over the next several years. Slashdot links to a few articles addressing that question.
The first two articles say that Apple is totally overwhelmed by trying to certify developers and apps, and the delays and confusion have left many developers unhappy. (Another Slashdot post links to an article suggesting that some developers are trying to set up alternative app stores for jailbroken phones.) It isn’t surprising that there’s a backlog—the iPhone is hugely popular, and hobbyist developers can write for it, so there’s going to be a huge flood of material for Apple to handle. The question is, can Apple get enough control of the process to keep good developers happy? If not, will they have to sacrifice a meaningful review of app security (one of the ostensible reasons for the whole process), or will the potential of the phone be limited by slow approvals and developer flight?
The third article Slashdot links to predicts that sales of Android phones could surpass iPhones in three years. The article is remarkably data-free, though, so I don’t know how much to trust that conclusion. Morgan Stanley estimates that iPhones outsold the Android-based HTC phones 6 to 1 in the last quarter of 2008. Better hardware would be a huge boost for the Android OS, so it will be interesting to watch those numbers when new phones arrive. (Doesn’t it seem like new Android-based phones have been inexplicably slow to come out?)
It’s worth pausing for a moment and remembering why we care about all this from a generativity perspective. Yes, Apple is a private company and can do what they want, and yes, you don’t need every gadget in your life to work just like a PC. There’s a place in the world for limited-function appliances, like (perhaps) TiVos or Kindles, that do exactly what you ask and never crash. (Although you might still be upset that their makers can yank features after touting them.) And people can certainly argue—Steve Jobs once did—that a phone should be just that kind of limited-function appliance (what Prof. Z would call “tethered”).
But the iPhone is just a small computer, and, as Irwin Jacobs argued at last week’s conference on the Information Technology and the Public Good, these little mobile computers are the future. If you think the Internet-PC combination has produced amazing, game-changing things, you should be worried that the “PC” part of that equation drops out in the mobile world, to be replaced by a gadget that Apple’s gatekeepers oversee. Most of us wouldn’t let Apple tell us what we could download to the Mac. It’s not clear why the iPhone should be so different, given the enormous (and fun) potential of mobile computing. Of course we want our phones to work, but we ought to think—like Google and others are thinking—about whether there’s a better way to accomplish that goal than handing our mini-PCs to overworked gatekeepers.
March 10th, 2009 at 4:08 am (#)
The hardware does seem to be slow in coming (from my experience in the UK certainly), only the other day I went into a Vodafone store asking about the (Vodafone exclusive) Magic HTC, and knew more than they or their system did.
I’m keen to pick up one of these phones, probably not until May at the earliest but even so, and I’ll need information between now and then to decide if it’s a viable option.
Personally I’m not a fan of Apple in general, but that’s not to say I’ve slated all Apple products without giving them the chance, I can see the value in some of them, but for these Android phones I was switched onto them by the fact you can get Last.fm on them, a strong selling point for me.
Unfortunately it seems Vodafone will need to get their act together between now and April (?) to make them a market contender.