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Why the Google Android Phone Isn't Taking Off
Hugh Pickens writes "Farhad Manjoo writes in Slate that while the iPhone commands nearly 14 percent of smartphone sales and BlackBerry about 21 percent, Android has only 3 percent. And even though Android is far friendlier to developers, it has failed to attract anywhere near the number of apps now clogging the iPhone. Manjoo writes that Google went wrong by giving handset manufacturers and carriers too much control over the design and marketing of Android phones so there is no idealized 'Google phone' — instead, Android devices get names like the T-Mobile G1 or the myTouch 3G, and each is marketed separately and comes with its own distinct capabilities and shortcomings. 'Outside handset manufacturers lack ambition — -none of them even seems to be trying to match the capabilities of the iPhone, let alone to knock us down with features that far surpass those of Apple's device,' writes Manjoo. 'A smart handset manufacturer could build a top-of-the-line Android device that outshines Apple's phone in at least a few areas — better battery life, a much better Web browser, a brighter or bigger screen, faster or more functional controls... something that might help Android inspire gadget lust. But so far, that's not happening.' John Gruber echoes this advice and adds this advice to Android manufacturers: 'If Apple is BMW, you can be Porsche.'"
The G1 and myTouch are nice, unfortunately they're on T-Mobile, which is nice but not nice everywhere. If T-Mobile worked in my area I would certainly try them out, at least.
Part of the lack of good apps is the lack of solid documentation and examples. I spent weeks learning the API, but anytime I wanted to do something more meaningful that display stuff on the screen, I would get bogged down trying to figure out how to do it.
I'm not a newbie, I started programming computers back in the eighties (Z80 and 6502 assembler) so I know my way around, but the documentation is horrible, sometimes you think you got it all figured out and it turns out is an earlier / later version of the API, which doesn't quite work that way anyway.
Also, for those of us outside the U.S., it's hard to get a real phone to play with, even when Google gave thousands aways at Google I/O, you can't get one internationally at a reduced price.(At least you couldn't last time I checked.)
I gave up and decided to come back when there was some organization to the docs and some real support for independent developers
Having said all that, I believe the platform will take off and do very well; it is simply too young.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
I joined the dev programs so I could buy a completely unlocked phone. Honestly Google should have told carriers to stuff it and sold the GooglePhone completely unlocked.
Market the googlephone as well. Anyone seeing mine says "what is that?" nobody knows about them because apple out marketed everyone, and google is sitting there going, buy my stuff please? pretty please?
I'll give you a sucker, it's Pina Colada....
It's an example of lets not market this thing and let's laso make it very un-shiny.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I spent several months at a startup where we were going to make $$profit by writing and selling Android applications. The problem is that the phones are, well, awful. The iPhone has set the standard, and things like the G1 are simply uninspiring by comparison. We would try to raise money, and in a room full of tech-savvy investors, most people have iPhones. We would pass around the G1 so they could see our app. Bottom line, they were not interested in investing money in a product that ran on a phone that was ugly.
Consequently I now write SQL for a living and get paid by the hour.
Android has done some great things. The control the user can have, the security model, the interaction between apps are all well thought out. One of these days it's going to be significant. Probably right after Linux is ready for the desktop.
And even though Android is far friendlier to developers, it has failed to attract anywhere near the number of apps now clogging the iPhone.
I hear people parroting the first part of that statement, invariably without any supporting evidence. Please explain - I'm asking this seriously - why Android is "far friendlier to developers". If the apps aren't being developed, I'd argue that's at least one piece of evidence running counter to that assumption. The iPhone (and iPod Touch) seemed to have a significant number of third-party apps already available at launch, so marketshare can't explain it all away. Besides, as people love saying here, the iPhone's market share is not really all that big compared to some others (no, you can't have it both ways).
So is Android actually friendlier to developers, or is it just the old "it's on Linux and Open Source, so it contains the maximum degree of friendliness possible no matter how much a pain in the butt it is to use"?
#DeleteChrome
Signed up right away, got my Dev Phone 1 and then came the news that pretty much knocked most of the wind out of my sales when it came to development: Google announced that they were requiring developers to deal with collecting sales tax. I'd imagine that I'm not the only person wanting to write a few small apps in hopes of making a little extra income that was completely put off by the decision.
HTC's Dream and Magic are selling better then expected.
It was never Google's or HTC's plan to take the market by storm, they intended to bleed Android in slowly rather then try to shove it at everyone at once a la Apple.
The Android market growth is slow, but steady. Comparing Google Android to Apple iphone is like comparing the tortoise to the hare. Android has only been released for a bit over 9 months, Google is following its standard MO, release slowly and improve just like it does with all of its services (Gmail for example). Google is simply not rushing to market. In the 9 months that Android has been released we've had two updates 1.1 and 1.5 (which added a heap of functionality).
Android will continue to grow as more handsets are released for it. It's a fair point that the HTC hardware could be better (it's not that bad either) but compared with the gen 1 iphone the gen 1 Android phone (HTC Dream) is far superior and HTC failure and DOA rate is far lower then that of Apple (this is why HTC phones are so expensive). Android is a good OS and it's usage will continue to grow. HTC have released their third phone (HTC Hero), just not in the states, Motarola have 2 on the way ("Sholes" and "Morrison") and Sony has 1 (Xpeira "Rachel") which looks to be the best HW yet for Android. After 5 minutes of using my android phone I realised that it wasn't competing with the Iphone, Google is targeting WinMo and has every chance of supplanting WinMo if development continues at it's current breakneck pace.
As for a "killer app", it's called flash and is coming in Donut.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Reading the comments I got the feeling I was reading a 9 months old article, I actually went to check the date on comments a few times.
Might I remind you that Android handsets have been released around the world, not only in the USA.
In France for instance, the HTCMagic (the G2 I believe) had advertisement in the metro and was labeled as a Google Phone (it's the Android name that doesn't pushed get out there, not the Google name). In Australia there are also ads for the same phone in phone shops.
Also, they are about 4 phones available right now running android (HTCDream, Magic, Hero and Samsung Galaxy).
Always going back to the T Mobile G1 is a little backwards looking and sort of like complaining about how the iPhone 1 doesn't have 3G.
The HTC Hero has an entirely revamped UI for instance, so things are also evolving outside the hood as well as under (even if the Hero's hardware admittedly isn't good enough and not future-proof).
So although I agree that Android lacks a killer app and the I want one factor that the iPhone has, saying that Android has problems because T Mobile's network sucks is really USA-centric.
From the different reports we've seen, the Magic has sold a million units since it was released in May. Now we're nowhere near iPhone numbers, but it isn't exactly a failure commercially speaking.
Considering another 15 or so phones running Android should come out before the end of the year (probably quite a few Samsungs, at least one Sony-Ericsson and some more HTCs), Android is gearing up.
I'm not saying it doesn't need a whole lot more marketing, a lot more see how easy it is to do this on Android type ads on TV to explain to non tech-savvy people why it's good, better form factors and gadget lust or some unified branding to avoid having a same phone have 5 different names, but it's nowhere near the catastrophe some seem to see it as. As someone said, it's going to gain momentum slowly, not become the next big thing overnight.
No wit here.
What part of "don't have to pay Apple money to develop for Android" and "don't have to get Apple's permission to distribute" did you not understand?
Android is a platform that give much more, and more meaningful, freedoms to app developers.
I'll add another big one - on the Android platform, replacing core apps with your own version is *encouraged*, and in fact *designed into the platform*. Unlike Apple's recent filing about "altering the core experience" re: Google Voice. Apple could create an iPhone-themed app suite for the G1 tomorrow, host it on their own servers, and no one could say otherwise. That's a pretty fundamental difference.
Say what you will about the iPhone as a sexy beast, etc, but as a developer platform and ecosystem, the only thing Android is missing is higher handset sales.
Looking for a Rails developer in Chapel Hill?
Developer Friendly? Not, I spent some time a few months ago trying to port one of my games to the G1. The game requires some fairly heavy physics, it runs
blistering fast on the the iphone. The G1 however just is not up to the task, face it the IPhone is just a much better performing device. When it comes
to squeezing performance out of these tiny devices get java out of my way, I need to be able to program against the metal.
Got Code?
Android is a platform that give much more, and more meaningful, freedoms to app developers.
Freedom? Yes. Friendliness? Not that I've seen, and you haven't cited a single piece of evidence towards "friendliness", just "freedom".
It's really, really easy to get started with iPhone development. You pay Apple a small fee and get access to piles and piles of sample code, great documentation, a mature API, and you even get 2 support incidents in which you get to interact with a real Apple developer for your money. And now there's an ecosystem of developer forums, third-party libraries, articles, server/ad services, marketing support... it's actually a pretty friendly experience. It's true that Apple gets veto power, but even then the rejection letter is friendly :)
E pluribus unum
Yes, I have to agree, I work for the third largest IT company in the world and they send as many people as they can to attend Android courses. It is a very long time since I saw something this big. Given that there have been very few devices available to consumers I would say 3% market share is amazing.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Sadly, Android suffers from
So .. all in all, yes, it's far friendlier to developers, but it's also a highly frustrating platform to develop for.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
The current cell phone oligopoly needs to be broken the same way the Bell system was busted. There was a time when you could only buy your land line phone from Bell, there was only one directory (Free -white pages, advertised - yellow pages), and they owned the system from handset to handset. Costs were high, service was slow, and innovation was non-existent. There was a time when having two phones in the same house was the province of the ultra-rich. Then it was broken, you no longer had to rent your phone from Bell, but could go to the local store and buy one. Plug into an rj-11 jack and go. Soon every house had a phone in every room, you could buy answering machines, plug in a modem.... heck it wasn't too long before phone companies started to innovate and provide other services like caller ID. Sorry for the history rant, but we need the major cell and network providers to stop owning us handset to handset again. Apple shouldn't have had to convince AT&T to carry its phone, there should be a generic standard like RJ-11 where we can plug our phones into their network, and they move the bits. If they want to innovate on top of the bit moving, great, but don't their ownership of the devices is the problem that is stifling the market.
It's really, really easy to get started with iPhone development. You pay Apple a small fee and get access to piles and piles of sample code, great documentation, a mature API, and you even get 2 support incidents in which you get to interact with a real Apple developer for your money.
With Android, you get access to piles and piles of code without having to pay anyone. Want to know how the default music player works? Just look at the source code. Good luck finding the source to the iPhone's music player.
If you want to interact with a real Android developer, just post on the newsgroups or find them on IRC. Again, it's free.
I haven't done iPhone development, so I can't comment on the relative quality of Android's documentation or API, but they seem fine to me.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Probably because no one calls them "Android Phones". There are 5 phones on the market in the US right now that run Android, made by 2 different manufacturers. There are a half dozen more phones coming out by the end of the year, made by 3 more manufacturers, and that's soon enough that people have seen advertising and may be considering them for purchase. Can you name more than 2 of the phones? Conversely, would you know they were Android phones if a friend talked about getting one?
Hi there... Part of your comment is a bit misleading... you say:
"You pay Apple a small fee and get access to piles and piles of sample code, great documentation, a mature API"
Well, yeah, I guess you could go that route.
OR - you could sign up for the FREE account, get the SDK, get all that great documentation, get the mature API and get a fantastic emulator to test in.
When, and ONLY when you're ready to test on physical hardware, you can pay Apple just under $100 and get the ability to deploy to hardware and release to the store. But for all your getting started steps, you don't have to spend 1c more than it costs to start with Android.
The difference is the iPhone had -everything- usable
Except copy/paste, 3G, video recording, and several other features that came standard on other phones of the same period. But yeah, every one of the features they deigned to include worked quite well.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
There are 16 Android powered handsets that remain to be launched in the next 60 days. This includes models from Motorola, LG, and Samsung. The author of the article simply had no freaking clue what he was talking about, and as a result, he's missed:
* the G1 has 3% market share. Ummmmm..... that's a lot of handsets.
* The primary limit isn't the "crappy hardware" - it's the crappy network (yes, T-Mobile, your network is crappy until Indianapolis has 3G). Actually it's very good hardware, and the only rub against it is onboard storage and battery life. $25 8GB micro SDs fix the storage issue nicely and you can actually *replace* the battery, a novel idea in 1932 that Apple should have noticed by now. Oh, the primary limit might be the #3 network in the US being the only channel to get an Android in the US?
*Oh, there's also the little fact that THE CUSTOMER FOR HANDSETS IS NOT THE USER OF THE HANDSET IN THE US. The customer is THE CARRIER WHO RESELLS THE HANDSET. Openness is *not* in their financial interest, so class 3 Android (open w/Google Apps) is not in their interest. Fortunately, they see T Mobile retaining customers with the G1, and want some of that.
Here's reality:
* Android to date has been a success.
* The application base is built for future success.
* 16 new devices are going to hit the market by the end of the year from some of the biggest names in mobile.
* Android will be available on most carriers. The only question mark seems to be ATT, but they are rumored to have a Motorola handset out soon.
* Android is going to turn the smartphone into the PC market of early 90s when Wintel at Apple's lunch. There are few people (and zero would be correct) that can argue that a PC clone was better than a Mac at the time, but Windows did allow hardware manufacturers to lower costs to offset Apple's considerable advantage in technology. Oh, and Android is *a lot* more formidable competitor than Windows 3.x was.
-- $G