Slashdot Mirror
Steve Jobs Lashes Out At Android
Ponca City writes "Steve Jobs doesn't usually make a guest appearance on Apple's post-earnings conference calls with analysts, but this time he made an exception, attacking Google for marketing its operating system as 'open' versus Apple's 'closed' iOS. 'Google loves to characterize Android as "open" and iOS and iPhone as "closed." We find this a bit disingenuous, and clouding the real difference between our two approaches,' said Jobs. 'Android is very fragmented. Many Android [manufacturers], including the two largest, HTC and Motorola, install proprietary user interfaces to differentiate themselves from the commodity Android experience. The user's left to figure it out. Compare this to iPhone, where every handset works the same.' Jobs stated that the real debate is between 'fragmented versus integrated' and which is better for the consumer. 'When selling to users who want their devices to just work, we believe integrated will trump fragmented every time. And we also think our developers can be more innovative if they can target a singular platform rather than a hundred variants.' Jobs also criticized the Android Marketplace, pointing out that there are at least three other app stores being launched by vendors, causing confusion for users and work for developers. 'This is gonna be a mess for both users and developers,' Jobs said. 'Contrast this with Apple's integrated App Store, which offers users the easiest-to-use, largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone.'"
I hear it's so much better when someone else adjusts all the straps for you.
Didn't Dodsworth from Tweetdeck say that he had only two guys on the Android port, and fragmentation wasn't really an issue?
Jailbreak your iPhone and install what you want.
Re-Rom your Android and install what you want.
What's the difference?
iStuff just works until you want to do something Steve hasn't pre-approved. At which point it just doesn't work.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"When selling to users who want their devices to just work, we believe integrated will trump fragmented every time. And we also think our developers can be more innovative if they can target a singular platform rather than a hundred variants."
Integrated vs fragmented. He's just trying to redefine the terms in his favor.
Open > Closed
vs
Integrated > Fragmented
Well done Steve.
Wow, what an overheated headline. Jobs did not "lash out". He gave very reasoned response and delineated the significant differences in the philosophy and design of the 2 platforms. It wasnt an angry rant by any means.
No that's not what he was trying to say. He was trying to say, my shit is better than yours.
did you forget to take your meds?
I'm surprised fragmentation is his choice of argument against Android. There are several things iOS does better than Android, but it's getting harder and harder to develop for iOS because of fragmentation. Hell, it used to be called iPhone OS, not iOS, but now you have to make sure your code works on previous generation iPhones, the 4's retina display, the iPad, and the iPod Touch. Resolution differences, support for multitasking, and camera differences are all getting more difficult to manage!
'Changing the subject'.
"Folks have been saying your platform seems a bit proprietary and closed."
"Hey, how about them White Sox?"
"Your platform might be proprietary and closed."
"Yeah, well so is your mother!"
"Your platform is proprietary and closed."
"Oh yeah? Well, you just must not like having a good experience with your phone."
The problem is that all the more reasonable responses might paint them into a corner where they have to offer an option for a sandbox for a more open use of their platform - and their strategy precludes that as an option. So, like with elections where offering a valid option to voters is too risky (to your various monied interests), insulting the other option becomes the rule of the day.
Ryan Fenton
Hate to get all Stallman on you, but any definition of open that doesn't include "make install" is rather weak.
Log in or piss off.
The tweet is FUD... He missed the most important part.. How do you install this on a Droid or most other
Android devices? You need to root it just like you do to jailbreak a iPhone.
Android devices are far from open.. Don't believe the hype... My hope is for
a Ubuntu tablet.. Maybe that will actually be open...
Yes, because people have proven that having more than one drug store, supermarket, or fast food chain inevitably disorients them and fouls up their lives. Oh, wait.
I really do like my Apple products, but not for the reasons Jobs pushes; more like in spite of his ideas. I'd love another store, particularly one where Jobs Judeo-Christian mores aren't pushed upon me; or, conversely, if Apple's store stopped insisting that apps have to work they way they think they should, or that apps "can't duplicate functionality." I'm hugely fond my my iPad, but the idea that it would be less useful to me if there were more than one app store available to me... that's just wrong.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
For now, iOS lets me do what I need to do without getting in the way or making me find the right libraries or compile anything.
Honestly, I'm not sure what you're talking about. I have never had to reinstall an app other than during an update for that app. When my DROID updated Android, everything came back up. I have developed Android applications, the SDK is a just a zip that works in Linux, Windows even Mac. And you just unzip it and use the emulator and SDK that comes with it. Awhile ago, I tried to code iPhone apps but given that I don't have a Mac -- no luck!
When I spend time compiling software for the iOS, I want it to do something new and perhaps make some money while doing it.
Wow. Then perhaps you'd like to discuss the fees you had to pay in order to develop something for the iPhone? Are you enrolled in the iOS developer program? I put together the machine I develop on and it was quite inexpensive. And if I wanted to distribute my apps on Android Market I'm not aware of any fee or approval BS that comes with Apple's market. Do some reading:
To run an application on the iPhone, the application needs to be signed. This signed certificate is only granted by Apple after the developer has first developed the software through either the US$99/year Standard package or the US$299/year Enterprise package with the iPhone SDK.
Good luck "making a bit of money" when you're already negative from the get go!
... I read your blog so I know you're not stupid.
Really, your comment reads like something written by someone who is confusing the customer with the developer and has never tried coding an Android app. You're correct that git and make don't mean anything to a customer but it does if you consider that developers have to embrace the platform before the customer has an apps to use!
Short run: make your money on iPhone. Long run: Android wins out. Trust me on this one.
I can't tell if you're confused or trolling
My work here is dung.
How is one supposed to use Android without the phone? You can't evaluate Android independent of its use on a particular piece of hardware.
And the distribution and marketing model of Android guarantees the carrier and phone manufacturer the ability to do whatever they please. Android strikes a blow for software freedom while grievously wounding network freedom. If you are a tinkerer the you'll benefit from the open OS, Google and Motorola certainly do, they get free bugfixes from users all over the world! But if you are a non-hacking end user Android is just another carrier and manufacturer straight-jacket. Android is a phone company's handmaiden.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
It's a short hand for "install the build somewhere". Something which many in the latest crop of Android devices aren't too friendly about. If Google really wanted to equate Android with "open", they'd stop allowing the use of the Android trademark by manufacturers and carriers who lock down devices that way...
Log in or piss off.
With all due respect to Ghandi, that quote always annoyed me. For every 1 person in that quote whose last line was "Then you win" there are 10 more who have to substitute "Then you get your ass kicked".
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Great that you can alter Android's kernel. Too bad you can't just install it on whatever Android phone you want to.
Yup....
Steve Jobs is sucking too much mirror these days. iTunes synching experience = nightmare, nightmare, nightmare.
Add in the 50 dropped calls I had this past week. And the result is my iPhone is barely working as a phone.
That's crap.
If you buy an Android phone you get a good, straightforward user experience without having to do any kind of hacking on it. You have an easy to use app market with lots of apps which is loosely monitored to make sure it doesn't have malware (without having draconian yet poorly defined rules about what's acceptable and what's not). It comes with some apps that almost everyone is going to want, and has a simple mechanism for finding more apps to fit your needs. The experience you get with an out of the box Android phone is similar to what you get with an out of the box iPhone.
If you're happy with that experience, you're in good shape. There's nothing else you need to do. With iOS, if you're unhappy with that experience you're pretty much out of luck. With Android, the operating system will step out of your way. You have the opportunity to screw things up, but you also have the ability to do things the phone manufacturer never imagined (or perhaps, doesn't approve of).
I don't buy the argument that additional freedom is a bad thing.
If you use both a desktop and a laptop, things get even more complicated.
One thing that totally pulled me off the whole "iOS experience" is when I configured my newly purchased iPad using my netbook, and synced up some stuff (e.g. books) with it that way.
Side note - why I can't just drag & drop books onto it, and have to go around by first importing them into iTunes and then force-syncing them, is beyond me, but whatever...
Now I plug iPad into my desktop PC, and it tells me to GTFO because it's already set up to sync with a different computer. Apparently, I can change it to sync with the desktop, but doing so will delete all books I've previously synced from the netbook. What the fuck?
Overall, the whole scheme with iTunes seems very convoluted, and not just to me - my mother, for whom that iPad was actually bought, also finds it counter-intuitive, and she's very much an inexperienced user when it comes to anything related to computers. Still, she readily understood the concept of dragging documents to and from a USB stick with a mouse, and was thoroughly confused by the fact that she can't do the same with iPad (and that it doesn't even appear under "Computer" in the same way her music player and camera do).
Jobs was only trying to change the subject here. The subject was open vs. non-open platform. Jobs quickly turned the conversation to "Android is very fragmented", which does not speak about the topic of open vs. closed. It really shows how scared he is of Android, because he can't talk his way out of the fact that the iPhone is one of the most heavily restricted software/hardware platforms in the world. The conversation isn't really about 'fragmented vs. integrated' - users don't care, but they do care when they can't run software they want to run, and that is where Jobs is trying to change the subject.
The tweet is FUD... He missed the most important part.. How do you install this on a Droid or most other
Android devices?
If you are compiling your own operating systems, maybe you should get a developer phone? You can install anything you want on those.
You need to root it just like you do to jailbreak a iPhone.
That's FUD. If your phone is locked down by your carrier or manufacturer, yes you'd need to root it. However, that's where similarities stop - i.e. try compiling your own version of iOS - that's right, you can't, it's NOT open source. That's the difference.
Android devices are far from open.
Most are locked down. Dev phones are not. Most that are locked down are easily rooted.
The big difference, again, is the operating system, not a device. Anyone - i.e. any startup tech company - can take Android source code and start making and selling their own cool devices based on it. That's the advantage of it being open source.
also, apple is a hypocrite. They insist that a Mac and PC are two different things entirely! To stay in line with that line of thinking Jobs should just refer to other phones as just phones and his is the iPhone.
Balderdash!