This week brings a new competitor to the smart phone market – Droid, from Motorola. Little is known about Droid thus far, except that it will feature Android 2.0, a physical keyboard, touch screen, a 5.0 megapixel digital camera with autofocus, and that it seems to position itself directly against the iPhone.
Motorola has released an ad targeted pretty much directly at the iPhone, and is using the rather daring tagline “iDon’t [blank] … Everything iDon’t, droid does.” The ad in question. The ad takes shots at the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard, notoriously bad App Store approval process, shoddy home screen, and a few others. But it severely misses something – the apps.
iPhone unquestionably has the largest mobile app store market. Now that many phones are catching up to the iPhone in overall usability, the big differentiator seems to be what you can actually do with the phone itself. And, of course, what you can do with the phone is largely dependent on the apps available for the platform. Right now, the iPhone handily beats the rest of the market with regards to what’s available for it.
Indeed, this is a bit counter intuitive. Blackberry, for example, still has more of the mobile market than the iPhone, an open development environment allowing you to install pretty much whatever you’d like, and has been around quite a while longer than the iPhone. But Apple’s store still trounces the catalog of apps available for Blackberry.
While people erupt over the iPhone’s seemingly arbitrary app store approval process, which has lead to denied applications and developers wondering if their app will ever be approved, the store still continues to grow, attracting new developers each day.
Apple has done something pretty amazing in regards to the iPhone. They’ve made a powerful platform, capable of doing 3d games reminiscent of the quality you’d get out of the original Playstation, and given customers an easy way to discover new content. Customers don’t have to check system specs before downloading, because 95% of the material available in the app store will work across all phones. The only small fracture being the new capabilities in the iPhone 3GS. Developers can code with confidence that their app will run on every iPhone on the market. Ironic, considering what a blistering failure the same sort of ideas would be on the desktop computer market.
And now let’s get back to Android. A very capable, open source mobile platform with the ability to run on just about anything. Very open development, allowing developers to harness just about every level of the hardware and OS itself. And it’s not going to take off, at least not in the way the iPhone has.
It’s biggest weakness is it’s biggest strength. Android can run on anything. Great for those that want total control and choice in their mobile device. Great for the developer, but also completely terrible. When writing the app, do you optimize for a touchscreen? Trackball? Physical keyboard? Onscreen keyboard? What CPU is it going to run? How much memory will it have?
This isn’t to say that Android won’t live on, but I think what you are going to see is more fragmented implementations like Android’s desktop cousin, Linux. We’ve already begun to see some of this with HTC’s Sense, and now Motorola’s Blur. Desktop Linux, however, does face one less challenge than Android, however. A developer writing an app for a desktop Linux can reasonably assume that the user has a keyboard and mouse.
As the iPhone has shown us, what works on the desktop doesn’t necessarily work on mobile devices. Actually, I guess I should say what Windows Mobile has shown us, given that it is the closest to a desktop experience, and arguably one of the worst mobile operating systems, but I digress. The majority of users are going to simply want to know that it works. Android does sort of confuse the issue a bit, and will likely introduce a new question to mobile customers: will this app work with my handset?
I hope I am wrong, and that the Droid, and the Android platform, is a runaway success. We’ve been shown over and over that competition is good for the customer, and iPhone owners will most certainly gain from a strong Android platform. I just hope that the biggest competition Android faces is not Android itself.
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