After watching the complete Google I/O keynote and WWDC '10 keynote, even I have to admit that Android (Froyo) has left iOS behind on features. Articles like [these][1] might say that Apple has given a solid reply, but I don't think they have. When I see features like Android's cloud-to-phone messaging APIs, I long for them to be in iOS. But then iOS 4 has nothing of this sort. Froyo also has APIs to make app data searchable, which iOS 4 doesn't for non-Apple apps. And these are just a few things that looking back at it now makes iOS 4 just seem so much weaker. Gingerbread will be out in October if I believe Engadget, and that will pull Android further away from iOS. People can talk about fragmentation — which will become less of an issue with Gingerbread, and the fact that users don't care about such features. But developers do. If Apple falls behind on features that developers want, the App Store numbers they like to tout to loudly will stop growing so rapidly.
To be honest, as a user, iOS 4 adds nothing that truly stands out as "THIS is why I must have the iPhone" except for Facetime and the Retina Display. Being a long time Apple loyalist and enthusiast, it both worries and saddens me to see Apple so blatantly miss the boat. So my question is, has Apple dropped the ball after a solid start and fallen behind so much that the trickle of developers will slowly become a full flow which they won't be able to stop?
[1]: www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/06/08/apples-ios-wwdc-strikes-back-after-googles-android-io/
Now show her the iphone 4 retina display.
"OOooo... I can actually read some of the text on that one!" she'll say.
Pixel density is nice and all, but a lot of people would rather have a bigger screen.
This illustrates Android's biggest advantage and biggest weakness versus iOS. Choice.
The trick for Google is to introduce some standards that will make different Android phones more consistent. Hell, they could do the same thing for the hardware. Crank out a cellphone chipset that manufacturers can customize instead of rolling their own and then being 8 months behind the latest Android release, if even that! Then the variety of Android phones out there will be a true strength and not a weakness.
I find android phones offering bigger and bigger screens a distraction. Sure, it suits some people, but most people are just going to find that phone too big.
The Droid has been shipping for 8 months with a 265 ppi display; funny how that was a meaningless spec that only geeks care about until recently.
I work at Apple (recent hire, admittedly), and there's a big focus on communication (part of the 'Apple Way') rather than on geeky stuff. I suspect that this isn't the case at Google.
ps. I'm not saying this to act like a fanboy towards my employer (really, I'm not). Experiment: ask someone to name 3 or 4 android phone models. Watch their eyes glaze over. They may ask: "what's Android?" The point I'm making is that there's the iPhone, which most people have heard of, and then there's the mass of confusion from other manufacturers. This is the case in other product lines too, such as MacBooks vs pc laptops.
Essentially every laptop / tablet / whatever-PC in use in the medical field works similarly - they use one application which handles all relevant data, and it doesn't search outside that. And this is on a PC, which is essentially wide open to application interoperability (if not as easy to do). Developers and users have already apparently decided that it's not as important / desirable as many would like to believe.
Granted, there are cases where this is useful, but it's a fundamental iOS / Android(/Unix) design choice. Android favors interoperation through APIs, iOS favors using one application for the job at hand.
Edit: I see discussion of gamut. To quote http://www.displaymate.com/Nexus_One_ShootOut.htm: The Color Gamut of the Nexus One is much larger than the industry standard … which is actually bad because it makes all colors appear too strong and over-saturated. … all they do it distort the colors in the images and photos on-screen
What good is it to have a larger gamut if the software doesn't support it? All graphics online & in apps use standard sRGB color space information. There’s simply nothing to display outside of that gamut in 99.9%+ of cases.
Keep this in mind, noone has an answer for the iPod Touch or the iPad yet. The iPod Touch outsells the PSP and nearly the DS in devices and in terms of content sales via iTunes (games and entertainment, none come close).
The iPad is another gaming console in a way and a pretty cheap laptop replacement. Not to mention the book market.
The iPad and iPod Touch make up over 65%+ devices sold by Apple and brings the total iOS devices to over 100 million.
Other companies keep thinking this is a Phone only market. When in fact the iPhone is only about 35-40% of Apple's devices that use the iOS and the iTunes/Appstore platform.
Where is the response to that? How many years will it take others to understand this. Apple is owning the mobile and handheld market and is making a ploy for all entertainment devices not just phones. Apple has to love that the competition looks past 65%+ of their market every new device.
The iPod Touch and iPad are the equivalent of Apple II's in schools and candy cigarettes when it comes time for kids to grow up and buy a phone. All their apps and games will be there waiting for them when they get one. This market is about so much more than phones...
Because Google cannot sell an Android device on its own. They tried, remember?
Google as an institution knows even less about selling retail products than the average hot dog vendor. Meanwhile, Apple has very deliberately spent a decade building the best direct-to-customer retail operation in the tech industry, perhaps even in any industry.
So Google's customer-facing sales operation consists of mobile phone carriers. That's been effective so far, though I still wonder how much of its success is driven by the existence of iPhone carrier exclusivity -- nothing motivates Verizon to sell, sell, sell those Android devices like the threat of losing a flood of subscribers. But carriers are only interested in selling phones, because phones come with usage fees and contracts.
The lack of direct connection to the customer has all sorts of side effects on Google's business, and one is that they have no obvious way to effectively bring an Android-powered iPod Touch to market. They need to build a retail system from scratch - an even more difficult version of the task at which Gateway, Sony, and Microsoft have already failed - or they need a partner. Which partner? Existing gaming companies, the ones with the brands, all have their own platforms. Microsoft, for the moment, has their own platform. PC vendors have been selling commodity widgets for so long that they've forgotten how to sell something new. Is Google supposed to just buy shelf space at Best Buy and hope? Go back in time to the 1990s and ask the old Apple Computer how well that strategy worked.
I'm not sure about that, if you're talking about the N1. They barely even tried to sell it, I see the N1 as defining a (tentative) baseline for Android, which is supported by rumors of its configuration (1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM, 800xwhatever 3.5" screen) being the minimum configuration required for gingerbread.
I like your future guessing skills :-). I don't think I have clue what's going to happen next month.
I think 5 years is actually pretty generous considering it took Apple about 10 years (while they control both the hardware and software side making it much easier) and everyone else can see the path that worked.
I disagree. The technology in iOS is pretty much at par with the competition -- a little better in some areas and a little worse in others. A few years ago, they were clearly on top but Android is decisively closing the gap.
But I understand you're just not speaking of their technology: they've got a very clear market lead in handheld devices and that's a gap which is much harder to bridge. But the competition is closing in fast here as well -- by Christmas there will be lots of Android (and perhaps other platform) tablets. Most will be cheaper yet just as capable. Android is already outselling the iPhone.
Also, it is clearly a phone-only market. The reason the iPhone exists at all is because Apple saw the writing on the wall: the iPod was going to be irrelevant when phones contained all the same capability. Mobile devices that aren't connected (in some way) to a mobile network are going to irrelevant soon.
Apple isn't making a play for all entertainment devices. They make one model of phone, one model of PDA, and one tablet. They purposely (and profitably) think small. Their goal isn't and has never been world domination.
It's funny you bring up Apple II's in schools because I'm almost certain we're going to get a great lesson in history repeating itself. Except this time it won't be Microsoft with the dominant platform, it will be Google.
The one problem with that is that the iOS is actually more like windows creating a common platform, similar form factors and simplifying the features and complexity of the consumer handheld devices. That is actually the same approach Windows took to get your mom on the internet and using office.
For far too long the mobile market was fragmented. Windows consolidated the desktop market to create many more platforms and markets for people. Apple iOS is a common platform in mobile while the others are still pretty fragmented. Apple is looking to do the same for entertainers, developers, marketers etc. Once they open it up by selling at Wal-mart and get other carriers it will be a true test.
Most people wont pay for the difference of that extra level of superb integration that Apple offer.. the gap will close as there is so much volume and competition in the mobile and tablet space.
I actually think we are close to optimizing the mobile form factor.
What other hw features could you have on these devices.. [natural spoken language translation in realtime?] its all software from here on up.
Solar panels, e.g. Apples's patent for a screen integrated one, contactless inductive charging, pixelqi style sunlight readable display, e-ink style display which uses no power to keep a static display, display privacy with a display that can change it's viewing angle right down, make the back optionally touch sensitive as well, if you remember Doc. Brown from back to the future had some augmented reality binoculars, you could speculate about possible camera improvements which would aid that kind of thing such as infra red sensitivity to help apps locate people in scenes, haptic feedback more than just 'vibrate', and again very speculatively dynamic changing materials - e.g. If the handheld device could change texture, kinetic charging, pico projectors, pressure sensitivity both on the screen and on the device generally, someone made a nice hack to wear a magnetic ring so they could gesture above their phone and sense it using the compass - theremins can do similar using some kind of em field distortion, could a device integrate anything like that without a huge aerial?
I'm not sure if you're saying there's nothing else we could put in a device now in hardware terms, or if there's nothing else interesting we could put in a handheld device ever, or just nothing we could put in that a consumer would want, but I'm not convinced for any interpretation.
its better when you decouple hardware and software.
Citation needed.
so Apple's shipped about the same number of iOS as MS has Windows 7?
Let's take your examples. When most people search their phone they're looking for information in either mail, contacts, or SMS messages. They don't want the data from the other hundred programs on their phone cluttering up the important results from those areas. So in this case Apple's stance is actually an advantage for the users.
On the cloud to device API it is nice but it's not like you can't accomplish the same goal simply by polling. So while this is an area where android is superior I don't think it's a feature that makes that much of a difference.
All that said the greatest argument against android winning because of features is the fact that they've always had more features than iOS. I mean if multitasking wasn't a big enough feature to woo users to android than I don't think something like cloud to device messaging is going to do it.
For as long as Mac OS X 10.2 (that's when I jumped on board, so I can't comment about the OS 9 days), this has been how Apple has operated.
Mac OS X is actually pretty feature devoid, out-of-the-box. First thing I have to do when I get a new machine is install Google Search Box, Growl, Skitch, MarcoPolo just so it feels like it works right. I don't count these as applications; I think of them as base OS features. By laundry list of features, Windows comes out on top.
What is different is that Mac OS X's UNIX underpinnings, coupled with a thoughtful Cocoa API means that developers can fill in the gaps for power users, whereas everyone else is happy with the experience they get. I'm not sure if Apple's strategists really understand this, or if it is just the engineers. You could be forgiven for thinking the UNIX core is just some accident of history due to NeXT rather than any conscious effort.
iOS doesn't support extension like this, and it's deliberate and calculated. The App Store is not there to protect normal users, it's there to protect Apple. If you gave users the option of App Store apps and also the ability to install unsigned apps (with appropriate scary warnings), all the people Apple claims to be concerned about would function exactly as they do now, downloading from the App Store and avoiding everything else. Why would they need to do otherwise? Instead, we have an App Store that seems to be all about sticking it to Google and maintaining some Disney-esque political landscape. It's nothing like the Apple we used to know.
1) Apple was first-to-market. And I don't mean the iPhone. The iPod was when apple just used a rocket booster to jump ahead of the game, and finally their steam is running low.
- The iPod was revolutionary. - The iPod was never quite cloned "correctly" there was more to the iPod than meets the eye. By the time Apple removed the DRM restrictions it was too late for consumers, Apple had already made a dent in the market which others could not recover from. - When everyone finally caught up to the iPod... poof there goes the iPhone again darting apple ahead of the game. For at least 2 years before again anyone even came close. - The iPad is another attempt to do the same, but by now it did not dart them as far as the iPhone did. The competition is now riding on unicorns and are hard to out-meneuver.
2) Apple literally filled the void of the tech industry. The void was in usability. It was simple, give users a very friendly UI, and lets do away with core concepts we find important but most don't. I don't know how to explain "files" to my grandfather. He asks me "will my programs be there when I leave home with my laptop?" I tell him yes and no. You need an internet connection because to him his "programs" are the websites he visits. He can't even grasp the concept of moving files from hard disk to usb flash drive. To him "files" are mythical unicorns. And I see this from many people, he is just the best example. Apple is trying to cater to the audience of people who are completely lost with computers by making computers behave like "real" objects are inside them. The ipad is a great example because it makes things tangible. A child can understand it.
The point at the end is this: Apple never had "features" they had "usability". OSX is a great OS because it combines user friendliness with unix. That is why developers love it. Hey I can't get over how awesome it is that uninstalling an application is dragging it from applications to trash (just got a mac). And to top it all off its quite easy to find all configurations and such for any installed application. On top of it all I don't feel like I need to re-install mac osx every 6 months like I had to with windows xp. AND to make it even better their keyboard shortcuts are a perfect fit for a laptop keyboard without having to resort to a lack of home/end/page up/page down keys. I swear check out those 4 frequently used keys layout in ANY pc laptop. It is insanity. Look at mac, the defaults are made so that you can use the say layout/combinations everywhere, brilliant!
In the end apple is running out of steam. I think they will level out in a year or two taking their place as the new Microsoft of the industry (which is fine). I just wish macs were not so f-ing expensive. I mean I feel like I am getting inappropriately touched by Steve Jobs every time I add more ram to my order.
The Apple iPhone is a mobile experience.
Those of us who are fortunate to forgo its "lack" of features, understand that it can add value to part of the routine and boredom of day-to-day life.
It's actually fun to do something productive and/or kill time with it while out-and-about.
Repost but from presentation by Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering:
1st generation - It's about the Technology (Big mainframe computers - had to go to specialized training at HQ to be able to use it, let alone program it. Early dotcom sites where you could theoretically buy something if you could figure it out)
2nd generation - Features (Mobile phones with streaming TV, MP3 - all thrown in, loosely coupled, none integrated, some Internet portals)
3rd generation - Experience (Craigslist, MySpace (it does what their target market wants them to - peer communication), Google is getting there... Facebook is getting there, flying sheep aside).
In Jared's opinion, the Apple iPhone leapfrogged directly to the 3rd generation - it's not a phone, it's not a portable computer - it is a great way to kill time (everywhere I go I see people trying to kill time on their mobile phones, rarely is it an iPhone).
Why even bother with a smartphone and an app store then?
That in mind I see Apple's point here as being "we think developers will abuse search if they are allowed in and we don't think users want that so we're keeping them out". Not "Google beat us to that feature"
Apple might not be right in thinking that I'm just trying to point out that's their design philosophy and not a sign that Android has leap frogged them.
Isn’t that exactly what push notifications are? Apps like Notifo, and Boxcar for that matter, allow you to implement push notifications for anything (c.f. Github integration) without even a dedicated iPhone app.
> users don't care about [fragmentation].
While Joe Consumer may not grok fragmentation, it definitely impacts his experience. E.g. the official Twitter app not being available on Droid or the Incredible, last I heard.
I don’t see Apple as missing the boat so much as taking their time to do things right. Just like copy-paste and multitasking. Patience for the polish, or yeah, go to Android.
To answer your question, iPhone will, yes, always lack features Android has, for the foreseeable future, but the experience is smoother and more consistent. Strictly in this sense, it it Android that will never catch up.
(This is pretty much what Gruber has been saying: http://www.macworld.com/article/151235/2010/05/apple_rolls.h...)
Runs just fine on my Milestone and should also run on the Droid. But I see what you mean.
You point to Android specifically, but I don't think anything you've mentioned is a selling point on the device/os specifically.
is 'cloud-to-phone messaging api' really something that a customer is going to be looking at when comparing devices? And if so, is it actually a feature that can't be replicated in any OS quite simply?
I think the market share challenges in the mobile space are less about OS feature capabilities like you describe than the more basic requirements like battery life, screen quality, design and brand perception.
Using your cloud-to-phone example again, is this really that much different from app notifications in iPhone (I'm pretty sure that is in the api). You say it's the features that developers want, but developers need to focus on the needs of consumers, rather than just what's the geekiest thing I can build.
If Apple is falling behind anywhere, I suspect it is in the UI design, which I don't find particularly compelling. It does a decent job of getting out of the way, and it is nicer than blackberry, but it very quickly seemed to have gone from cutting edge to ho-hum. I don't look at an iphone and think that it is beautiful and easy to use. The home screen with all the buttons and no way of organizing them seems clutter, and the grid is bland without any character.
I was at WWDC. There are a lot of things I saw there that I'm not supposed to talk about. Suffice it to say that the cool stuff was NOT in the keynote.
I came out of WWDC thinking that Google may very well never catch up. They don't seem to care about Android like Apple cares about the iPhone. Apple cares enough about the iPhone to learn how to do cloud services (see Push) and advertising (see iAd) better than Google, things that Apple has no experience doing well. But Google doesn't care about Android enough to invest into build quality or UI, things that Apple does well.
Build quality, probably not, especially since Google doesn't really do hardware. But it's been widely reported that they're making a big UI push. I expect them to do well on usability: they've got the talent to catch up to Apple on that. Aesthetics are another matter, however.
With the exception of the better-than-Apple notifications, isn’t Android just attempting to copy lots of UI idioms from iOS in a slightly less usable manner? This is a Mac → Win GUI situation again, is it not? With engineers and programmers driving Android as essentially a Google side project, what’s to actually instill serious quality control and innovation for interfaces?
Highly unlikely; unless they lose their consumer market too.
Because, at the end of the day, developers will jump through a few hoops (and rightfully gripe) to sell to the biggest user base.
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/06/full-an...
I was definitely the first to gripe and complain when the iPhone didn't have cut and paste, but I'll also be the first to admit that they _did_ get it right when they finally released it.
I was also one of the many loud voices complaining that I couldn't run backgrounded apps, but when you look at the HTC phones coming out right now running Android and full backgrounding, and you hear the stories of how the battery runs out by the early afternoon, you start to realize that, it is true, "it is easy to add <feature x>, but it is hard to get it right" (or whatever it was that jobs said in his announcements)
I'm not saying that the features in Android aren't impressive, they very well may be, but Apple's design decisions don't just go after "impressive", they try to go after "perfect", and sometimes getting features perfect means cutting them until you're ready
Your entire post is targetted as "features that developers want" and you're right, you need a healthy ecosystem of developers, and Google is certainly building one. However, you also need a healthy ecosystem of consumers who love the product, and at the end of the day, I really think most developers will go to the platform where they can reach the widest audience. Apple cares about their consumers first, and their developers second (and sometimes it feels like second last), but it seems to work for them...
edit: of course, sometimes apple's PR doesn't respond to consumers as best as it could (i.e. the "you're holding it wrong"), but I'm trying to focus on design/product decisions
This is exactly what I was thinking. It is an interesting question- do consumers follow developers or do developers follow consumers? It seems that those agreeing with the OP would argue the former while those disagreeing would argue the latter.
History seems to suggest that developers (especially those who want to get paid) go where the consumers are.
The only exception is, perhaps, DOS/Windows? I'm not sure I remember the history right though. It could be that consumers switched to Windows because of the cheaper hardware, and developers followed.
If you want to develop on a platform where people are willing to pay premium prices for premium products then you have nothing to worry about with Froyo.
The App Store is in a bubble and that bubble will burst, not because the App Store is evil, but because it's in the nature of bubbles to burst.
You'd literally have gotten better traction developing ActiveX controls for IE5, back in the day.
If you want to write some module or extention for your corporate system for mobile devices - Android is the obvious choice.
The history repeats itself, Google will be to Apple what Redhat was to Sun, Data General, SCO, and other now dead UNIX vendors. It just a matter of a time.
Then, when I read the title, I just thought 'wtf'? Behind? So I read your post because I was curious about what you mean. Again, I even more wonder what you mean by irrevocably. And how those few missing APIs should be the reason that iOS is behind Android.
Android is shooting for share, and they will get it eventually, because of the number of devices it ships on. Once they have that, most (if not all) developers will follow. Missing APIs can be added, but users are hard to convert back — Apple and we know this from the PC vs. Mac days. My question was, has this shift already been set in motion fast enough that Apple will not be able to catch up.
(Of course, tech news on the Internet is very US centric, but those of us who are outside the US can see how non-existent Android is here. I haven't been able to factor in the whole "Android for world domination" theory just yet.)
In fact, I think in some ways iOS 4 is a step backwards, in that it adds half baked "features" like folders and the multitasking UI (my gripe is with the UI only). They aren't nearly as well thought out as the rest of the OS.
Android does have some well implemented features which I like though, specifically Facebook integration with the address book, etc.
2. iOS 4 is packed with features for devs. Some of the new APIs and block-based animations have taken hundreds of lines of code out of my apps. Doing common tasks like throwing a new view on the screen are massively simpler compared to doing the same on Android.
3. Feature comparisons impressed IT managers in 1989 as they sat choosing between Word and WordPerfect from a list in Byte. Users don't care; they want things that work. They didn't care that the iPod didn't have wireless or as much space as a Nomad, and they still don't.
4. Seriously, features don't factor into it. For 8 years companies were trying to best the iPod by ladling in features, and each time the market told them to go zune eggs.
5. The phone companies are absolutely destroying Android. They're still launching devices with hacked-up versions of 1.6, with no promise of when Froyo will ever make it on there -- that is if the carriers decide to allow it. Imagine if Microsoft had been launching XP but Dell decided it would keep on shipping Win 98, and AOL wouldn't let users even upgrade to Win 2000. Ludicrous.
Android will be to Phones what Windows is to PCs (personal computers).
Its added advantage is Google is more open than Microsoft will ever be.
One more thing, Android competes favorable with iOS. Much better that Windows does with OSX
Let's roll back the clock, shall we? When the first iPhone came out, the OS didn't have support for copy/paste, or MMS, or video recording, or any way to install third-party applications, or a whole ton of Bluetooth devices, or a dozen other random things that everybody claimed were totally necessary.
It is absolutely not the case that iOS had a huge head start and Android has just now caught up (from a feature perspective). Android has been banging the "We have more features!" drum since before the G1 even launched. But here's the thing: even with all those awesome features, the Android software is still nowhere near as well-designed as iOS or the apps that ship with it.
So, as long as phones can do that, anything extra is developer wankery.
I don't think its iOS4 specific, once you have geo-location + offline + appdata + GPU graphics you've got the killer features you need, so why go native?
WebGL will happen, theyll have to support it & its easy to do so. Now I guess you might want to do AI in-game as the device gets more powerful, and write effects shaders for rich games.. But a lot of that can be deferred to server-side, so I think even for 3D games it will soon make more sense to go web app.
What apple have is slickness and consistency... but I think the slickness of web on Android will approach that asymptotically. The web dev platform is more scaleable, less pain, and wont go away.
What is missing is a good appstore + billing system for web apps [and google will probably be there in a year]. I think it needs to support a SaaS model where I rent a group of apps at a discount on a yearly basis. That way you have people invest more effort over time, innovate, and reach beyond the iFart apps.
I am confused. You started your post as a developer and end being an user.
There are some big things in iOS4. Multitasking (done properly), iAds, Game Center and 1500 New APIs and tonnes of improvements that apple has put in after taking experiences of millions apps created by thousands of developers. And That's HUGE.
So, to answer your question, no: iOS hasn't irrevocably fallen behind. Has it fallen behind, technically? Yeah, probably. Irrevocably so? No.
My hunch is that Google will have an easier time staying close enough on the UI front than Apple will catching up on services but we'll see. Lawsuits might make the difference.
If you are a developer, you want to ask 1) is it programmable 2) is there a market for something that I create.
It seems that the answer is yes for both of these.
Bullet points are for bystanders.
Yes, there is intense competition now and each player has to keep up with its OS features. We'll see who can keep their OS up to date with features that are important enough.
