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Eric Schmidt Doesn't Think Android Is Fragmented
adeelarshad82 writes "Eric Schmidt took issue with the idea that the Android mobile operating system is fragmented, arguing that it's a differentiation between devices rather than a fragmentation. The difference, as he explains it, is that differentiation means manufacturers have a choice, they're going to compete on their view of innovation, and try to convince consumers that their innovation is better than somebody elses whereas fragmentation is quite the opposite. Not surprisingly, some company analysts beg to differ, pointing out the ever increasing incompatibilities between OS and apps across different Android devices and other problems with Android."
There is no fragmentation problem with Android. It's always been something that Apple fanbois have used to attack Android for being less homogenous. The fact though is that Google provides the tools for developers to handle the variations in screen size and such and in practice developers don't seem to be having too much trouble with the fragmentation issue.
True early on some features wouldn't be supported on older versions of Android, but the same is true with iOS, Apple adds new features and doesn't necessarily port them to old iPhones.
Pretty much any Google app is better on Android. The way I've viewed it, when recommending phones to people, is that it depends on which non-phone camp you're in. I don't use iTunes, my email is Gmail, news reader is Google News, etc. My music is mostly from Amazon and stored in a folder structure but any major player is able to read the tags. And I've been dabbling in Google Music lately anyway. So Android gives me the best Google experience. The Google+ app is always going to get Android updates and features first, as is most any other app by Google. And like you mentioned, Google maps navigation is top notch. However, if someone has their life in iTunes and would love to have that seamlessly carry over to their phone. I'll tell them they might prefer the iPhone. For what it's worth, my wife just upgraded from a BB Storm 2 to an iPhone 4S. It was hardly a seamless upgrade and she spent the first few days complaining about how much of a pain it was to set up the new phone and make it do what she wanted. She even said at one point that it was easier to set up the BB than the iPhone! Ultimately I don't think there's that much of a difference anymore either. Both are a phone with a button and a bunch of app icons. Both get you on the web. Both have Facebook. However I've yet to still see anything really that the iPhone does better than my Galaxy Nexus.
I'm not the AC to whom you replied, but I did the same thing s/he did. Had an iPhone, switched to Android, and switched to a 4s as soon as my contract was up.
The reasons for moving to Android were openness and ability to side-load. It turned out, these weren't that big a deal.
First of all, ideologically, Android isn't really open for me. It's open in the same way that Tivo is open. Parts are based on Linux, other parts are new. Some of it is available to me, some of it isn't. But what matters (to me) is that I can't just download the source, compile it, and end up with a working build. At BEST, with a lot of work, I can get something on my phone which resembles the original (minus e.g. Google's apps, which are half of the reason to get an Android phone to begin with.) At worst, the phone has a locked bootloader, and you can't put a new ROM on there.
If my two choices are both effectively closed, then the openness of the platform is irrelevant.
I also found that I never cared to sideload. It wasn't difficult to do--I just never had a reason to. And all of the apps I had on my phone would have gone through the Apple App Store approval process--I wasn't doing anything really off the wall. So I had no need to sideload.
Then there's the issue of upgradeability. I figure that my Android phone would have been vulnerable to known exploits for about 1/4 of the contract. That's due to the carrier/manufacturer failing to update in a timely manner. The build process is fairly onerous, so I wasn't going to do it myself. Going with Cyanogen, I got updates faster. But I don't want to have to do that. Apple updates very old hardware to new OSs. Their time-to-fix vulnerabilities isn't much (if any) worse than Cyanogen.
So at the end of the day, I had to decide based on features. Both Android and iOS do what I want them to, but iOS does it cleaner and smoother.