Slashdot Mirror
Android vs. iPhone — Who Wins In 2011?
Hugh Pickens writes "Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes in Fortune Magazine that Apple and Google have two very different strategies in the competition shaping up in 2011 between Android and iPhone. According to the conventional wisdom as espoused by Don Dodge, a Developer Advocate at Google, both Apple and Google will win because they are playing different games. Android will win the market share battle, but Apple will generate bigger profits. 'Apple goes for the high end of the market where they can charge high prices and enjoy great profit margins. Apple has been successful with this strategy multiple times, and will do it again with iPhone,' writes Dodge adding that Google's strategy with Android is to generate revenue streams from mobile search and advertising. Another Google employee, Tim Bray, sees things differently and says he won't be surprised if Apple ships a cheap iPhone and if this time next year, dirt-cheap iPhones were competing against Androids that push the user-experience lever farther than Apple. 'There's nothing fundamental in Android that would get in the way of a industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team, whether at Google or one of the handset makers, testing the hypothesis that these things are central to Apple's success.'"
I have been sick to death of advertising for pretty much all my adult life. I think it's a horrible shame to name so many of our modern points of interest after corporations. I hate how everything must be branded, and I especially hate how tasteless it all is. Product placement sucks. Most of all I'm just blown away at how I have to pay for the carrier to bring the advertisements to me.
I pay about $80 per month for cable TV, and all the channels are ad-laden; it is standard for each hour of programming to contain 20 minutes of advertisements. Now, DVR technology has allowed us to skip those commercials if you're willing to watch the program on a time delay. But doing that costs extra. A few years ago I used an old PC as a homebrew DVR and it didn't cost anything above a small investment in hardware and software, but nowadays things are so locked down the only realistic option is to rent the box and pay for the "service" from the provider. So, as I see it, I'm getting screwed from every direction.
The content itself is laden with product placement, it's subsidized further by being 33% pure commercial advertisements, I have to pay to bring the crap-laden content to my TV, and I have to pay more to filter out some of the noise.
The internet is rapidly heading in the same direction. You can't view a lot of content without turning on scripting and flash, and the scripting and flash bring advertisements that cannot be blocked. I'm paying an ISP to bring the crap in for me, and the services that offer to sell me access to the content still won't promise to remove all the advertising if I do so.
So, with my iPhone, at least it's not loaded with advertisements. Of course it brings in the Internet ads for me, but it blocks the invasive ones and I bless the iPhone for the lack of flash. But at least for the most part I'm getting fair value for the service I pay for: I make and receive phone calls and text messages, and neither are subsidized by advertisement.
So, to me, the iPhone wins. I don't care about the openness and inexpensiveness of Android if it means everything I do with my phone is partially paid for by advertisement. I'm not going to pay a carrier for voice and data service so that they can use that pipe to shove ads in my face every time I pick up my phone. It's just ridiculous.
I'm starting to believe that our society will end not in natural disaster or nuclear armageddon. Instead, the signal-to-noise ratio of all our communications will drop so low that our culture and our future just disintegrate.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Agreed. The good thing about Apple's strategy (good for them, that is, you don't necessarily have to agree that it's good for buyers, even though I personally think it is), is that they target their products specifically at the group of buyers they know will appreciate exactly those attributes of their products they spend the most time on: ease of use, polish (both in terms of software and hardware), longevity (in terms of planned obsolesence). Affordability is not one of these attributes, and people getting iPhones instead of Androids get what they expected from the product, which explains the high customer satisfaction rates.
Meanwhile, Android handset manufacturers mainly target the demographic that wants to save money on their phone, ie: they want it to be cheap, or at least: cheaper than comparable alternatives. Sure enough Android is also great if you are a geek, and sure enough there are also high-end Android phones that are as expensive as the iPhone, but they constitute a pretty minor subset of all Android buyers. The problem with this tactic is that to make money using this strategy, means you have to sell lots of phones, and to do that, you have to introduce lots of new models, to get people to replace their phones faster. You also have to cut down production costs which means making design compromises. Eventually this will hurt Android as a platform and it will hurt customers, because there will be many crappy Android phones on the market, and many phones will end up unsupported within a year. Someone who gets burned by a crappy Android phone will choose something different next time.
I don't think the Google model is sustainable in the long run, and will seriously limit the usefulness of the Android platform. Not because it is a bad platform, but because too many buyers will have a negative experience with their purchase, but also because the insane variety of brands, specifications and OS versions will mean developers will never be able to achieve the same baseline quality level in their apps without having to shut out a very large part of Androids installed base. This will be very confusing and frustrating for end-users who expect to get their phone, go on the Android market, install stuff, only to find out their phone doesn't handle the application, or because the quality is abysmal. Apple got it right with their single-model-1-year-update-cycle, sure, it means you have less choice if you want an Apple phone, but at least you can be pretty sure you won't run into any surprises if you try to use it they way you expect it to work.
This last paragraph is exactly why I find the statement in the article by this guy named Tim Bray pretty stupid. Even if one or two vendors introduced phones that are better than the current iPhone in terms of hardware (such phones are already on the market) *and* software (Android is almost there), you'd still have only a few handset models, which combined will sell only a fraction of what the iPhone sells, and will never get individual marketshare big enough for developers to spend enough time extracting all their capabilities from the hardware and software. Most developers will go for a set baseline much lower than the current iPhone model, just to make sure they target a sufficiently large installed base. That way, the ecosystem of Android apps will always be one or two years behind iOS.
-1 flamebait.
It's an Apple vs. Android story you twit. It's here for us to argue the merits of each as we see it. Discuss which we think, based on our own experience and judgment (can't base it on somebody elses) which is the market "winner" for 2011. This is obvious by the TITLE of the story. I'm guessing you're an Apple hater, and wouldn't have attacked the same exact post if it had been touting Android instead. Either that, or clicked into the story with your post ready, just looking for somebody to lay it on.
By the way, I think Android feels very rickety and low end compared to iPhone. I've used both. I've used Android briefly in half a dozen different up-to-date incarnations. The iPhone is a joy to use, Android is like Windows 98, first edition, with a 3 dollar mouse. Does that make me a troll? I think the troll is the person who shits all over somebody just for having a different opinion.
What the hell is with all the damn adolescent war-mongering on this site? It wasn't always so bad. At least it didn't used to be moderated up to +4 on a regular basis. Sigh.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
I think the definition of expensive on this forum is whatever price Apple charges. Expensive in this space used to mean $600, now you can get a spectacular top of the line iPhone for $299 and less capable units (new) for down to $99.
$229 for a very nice iPod touch or $499 for an iPad? Seems like a pretty good deal to me.
Apple's strategy isn't to charge extra to artificially inflate their brand, but rather to make high quality devices and charge as little as they can for them and still sustain their business and large R & D expense.