You’ll have to forgive my recent foray into all of this Android vs Apple debate, but I have been involved in a number of very interesting, and thought provoking, conversation on the topic and I would love to get more input. I promise I will get back to more technology oriented topics tomorrow!!!
So in a recent conversation, a very bright young developer, named Eric Bustamante, forwarded this analogy:
If you think of it in terms of real life businesses, these App Stores are like digital extensions of real consumer retail stores. Apple, in that sense, is like Target, and Android Market is like the public market. Apple, like Target, selectively chooses what to put out and sell on their shelves. Android Market, like the public markets, lets anyone willing to pay a small fee share and sell their wares. Both are attractive places to shop for each other’s branding and type of consumer, regardless of the stipulations each impose on what gets sold/not sold in their outlets.
I thought this was a great analogy, and can see the draws each type of environment would have. The App Store has a greater degree of quality control, though their selection may be arbitrary. The Android Market, on the other hand, will have just about anything that people can come up with, but the questions of quality control will always be there.
So what is it that draws each type of consumer to each type of device and software distribution scheme? I guess a lot of it will depend on how comfortable you are with the technology. Someone who wants more direct control of their device and its software will opt for the chaos, and customization, of the Android device. Someone who “just wants to work” is going to go with Apple. Yet will this dichotomy always exist??? Can one platform ever survive without the other?
Thoughts?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Mac OS X can survive without any other and yes your analogy was quite good. Recently apple thought to take off the adult content apps from app store which is a good thing not to make apple app store a pornographic web-store. Android is good for those who wish to try something new coz they think that its google phone and it has something really great. But looking at the first week sales figure, only 20K android . Its just a hype i believe so. I might be wrong but not completely.
Cheers.
I find it quite interesting to note (in defense of Android Market) that it has a rating system, so to borrow from the analogy of an open public market, you have the reputation and number of people who have rated an item in the market as being a user review of the quality control itself.
That is free from the usual bias, so the comments about QC are not as true as what is claimed.
I also find Vikram’s comment regarding sale to be of moot point. He is looking at sales figures of a single handset model in it’s first week. If we looked at the numbers of sales of the Apple Lisa in the first week, we’d probably see only a handful of units sold, yet it still laid the foundations for some important changes in computing. Do you think Android could be more than marketing hype now?
BR,
Adam
Hi Adam,
Would you not admit that the quality of applications (without regard to rating) available on the Android Market seems to be lower than that of the apps in the iPhone App Store? You would think that simply because of the fact that Android apps have to support so many more versions of the OS and device there is no way they can be as stable as iPhone apps.
I am not saying this as a slam against the Android Market (though I do wish there was a way to search/filter by rating and number of downloads), just as a fact of computing life.
Taggard
Vikram – I’m afraid you’re very wrong. You have completed ignored all of the Android handsets – the Nexus One is just one of 20+ that are available. If you had, say, just got a new Motorola Droid in November, it’s very unlikely you would then get a Nexus One two months later in January (unless you have a lot of spare cash!). Android handset sales are well into the millions now, and it’s estimated that in 2009, 5% of all smartphone sales were Android – see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone What the chart doesn’t show is that Android market share has been rising steadily since the G1 was first released 18 months ago and is still doing so. Year-on-year it is the fastest growing OS by sales by a long way (over 1000% from 2008 to 2009) and in a much stronger position than the iPhone was a year after launch: http://gigaom.com/2010/03/18/the-mobile-os-market/
It should also be noted that Symbian, Blackberry and Windows Mobile are also significant smartphone OSes, based on their 2009 sales. And that Nokia sell a million mobile phones in total every DAY.
Taggard – regarding app quality, how do you define a good quality app? An app that does something clever/useful, or just an app that doesn’t crash? I’d rather have a really useful app that occasionally crashes, that a dull app that, for instance, just lets me read articles from a website, that works perfectly all the time. Apple only screen apps for their store from technical, security and offensive points of view, not for offering good value and worth actually having. And because of the sheer number of apps they’ve approved on that basis, developing a successful app is said to be like a lottery.
I’m an Android user, and I have hundreds of useful apps on my device, none of which have cost me a penny – to get the best apps on the iPhone, you have to pay.
I saw a great talk by a Mobile industry journalist recently – check out his slides at: http://www.slideshare.net/mobileindustryreview/devnest-7-mobile-industry-review