Great post that's basically a healthy dose of reality and commonsense.
A lot of those predicting Apple's doom (or simply decline) or a repeat of the OS wars are ignoring the power of Apple's supply chain. As Gruber puts it: if Android can make a great $100 handset why can't Apple?
The point about the cost of service contracts is worth repeating: the difference between an iPhone 4 or a free handset is about 10% of the total cost so price of the isn't all that important.
You see the power of Apple supply chain with the iPad. Apple (IMHO) had no real inkling of just how big it was going to be, just like they didn't know wit the original iPhone. Now volume is more of a known quantity Apple has a lot more room to increase specs and/or lower price with the anticated revision.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab (so far the most credible competitor) offers a screen half the size at a $600 price point. That's the power of Apple's supply chain.
It might be only 10% in the US, but it's significantly more than that in other countries.
In the UK, getting an iPhone 4 on a £25/mo 2 year contract from any of the 5 major carriers costs you £200-300, and gets you 100 minutes max and 500mb of data (some networks are more generous with the data).
In the end I got an HTC Desire HD, still £280 up-front, but £10 less a month (£240 less), 300 minutes, 'unlimited internet' (3GB). It was 70% of the TCO.
Even on the higher end (£40+), iPhone contracts offer significantly less of everything per month than Android or Blackberry phones they give you for free.
I don't know who's setting the prices, Apple or the carriers, but as Android keeps getting better I expect something interesting to happen over the next year or so.
However I expect nothing interesting to happen in the tablet sector when you can get a clearly-superior iPad for £30 more than Samsung's offering.
Android phones are starting to appear nearly free, but everybody (really everybody) seems to be carrying an iPhone nowadays. People don't even use it for anything but for phone and SMS; but that tells a lot about how strong it is as a phone brand now.
Despite knowing only two people with iPhones (brother and flatmate) and nearly a dozen with other smartphones, it still amazes me how 95% of the phones I see on the Tube are iPhones. London is more affluent than the rest of the country, however.
These cheap Android phones are a bigger threat to Nokia than Apple. Internationally Nokia feature phones are still incredible popular and pretty soon Android phones will be priced low enough to be extremely competitive.
I bought my first smartphone yesterday. A Huawei Ideos for $150NZ about $100 US (I actually payed $300NZD but that included $150 prepay credit). http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/mobile-phones/huawei-ideos-review-... Sure it's not as slick as an Iphone or Droid but the gap is closing. It runs Android 2.2 and has all the popular features eg gps/wifi/radio. Considering that an 8gb Iphone 4 costs $919 here in NZ ($600 on a contract) I think I got a pretty good deal. The next wave of smartphone users are going to be people like me that are driven by price more than features.
That's pretty much all I was thinking about while reading the article. While cheaper Android phones may hurt Apple a bit, I think it hurts Nokia much more if they aren't able to change fast enough. Judging from responses at the Meego conferences, I feel bad for Nokia.
It's amazing to me that any pundit would be stupid enough to claim that Android will eat Apple's lunch based on an analogy to Windows crushing Macintosh in the 90s.
Apple was a slowly sinking ship after Jobs left, coasting on old ideas and brand loyalty from the 80s. The Apple of the 90s was a different company, and there are no lessons there that are applicable to the Jobs era(s). To argue any differently belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the basis of Apple's success.
> It's amazing to me that any pundit would be stupid enough to claim that Android will eat Apple's lunch based on an analogy to Windows crushing Macintosh in the 90s.
It looks extremely relevant to me, so I'd love to hear a more substantiated rebuttal from you. The market seems to be poised to become a 70% Android lead and the rest split among Apple, Microsoft and Nokia in quantities to be determined.
I'm not even sure Apple will be able to get second place, to be honest, which makes the comparison to the Windows market even more relevant.
In the 90s Apple went for maximizing profits without any regards to market share, and they had bunch of CEOs who didn't understand computers.
Todays Apple has a fantastic production and supply chain, and a CEO who is way way better.
Instead of looking at Macs in the 90s, the pundits should look at the iPod domination in the last 10 years and how the iPad currently completely outsells the very few competitors.
Look at how MS tried to enter the mp3 player market, and have completely failed. Their latest phones failed too. Why do anybody expect them to be able to get anywhere when they have a CEO who doesn't understand consumers but only enterprise sales?
tl;dr: the pundits should talk with their kids and teenagers.
> Look at how MS tried to enter the mp3 player market, and have completely failed. Their latest phones failed too. Why do anybody expect them to be able to get anywhere when they have a CEO who doesn't understand consumers but only enterprise sales?
We're talking about Android, not Microsoft.
In terms of market share, all the numbers indicate that Android will most likely be #1 in the world (even passing Nokia) while Apple will struggle to be #4 or maybe #3 if they can keep ahead of Microsoft.
Again, I'm talking about market share, not profits (where Apple is the indisputable #1).
> The market seems to be poised to become a 70% Android lead and the rest split among Apple, Microsoft and Nokia in quantities to be determined.
How can you just throw this out there like a foregone conclusion? Mobile markets are still rapidly evolving. This is far more of a leap than my main point which is that Apple of the 90s and Apple of 00s are two completely different companies which do not have relevance to each other.
> I'm not even sure Apple will be able to get second place, to be honest, which makes the comparison to the Windows market even more relevant.
No, this is a legitmate question. Android will have the largest market share, but if Apple continues to own the profitable top of the market, then HTC et al will tear each other apart and destroy profitability until they are as worthless as commodity PC makers are today. And then it really will be a replay of Apple vs Microsoft - Apple is a profitable software/hardware company, Google is a profitable software company and the hardware-only companies are worth nothing.
It's embarassing that this not only went over your head, but enough people here for you to get more upvotes than me.
Alright, I'll spell it out for you:
Android marketshare is meaningless. How much money does anyone make per Android unit? I don't know offhand what Google's agreements with manufacturers are, but it's open source right? How much can they be collecting? What is the actual profit share of the mobile market? I could easily see a 99/1 unit split with the profits splitting 50/50.
I feel really sorry about you not getting upvotes, want a hug?
Maybe this has to do with the fact that you just don't understand what is being discussed here.
Market share is meaningful when we are talking about market share.
Nobody disputed that Apple is #1 in profits (I said so myself), but we're discussing what OS will be dominant in units in the next few years, and all the indicators point to Android at about 70% and Apple struggling to remain above 10%.
Which is what brought up this topic in the first place, since this market break down is reminiscent of the current Windows / Mac OS market.
A lot of the Mac vs. Windows scenario is more a myth than anything else. Look at the actual market shares in 1984 or 1985 and what they are now (hint: the C64 was a bigger player than the Mac).
If you care about Mac vs PC, then surely iPod vs Zune should be just as relevant. More so, given the consumer focus and iTunes being just as big a factor in both. The Apple that existed from 1985 to 1996 is long dead, what remains is NeXT part 2.
The massive economy of scale Apple can bring these days is pretty impressive and the iPod touch / iPad factors (as the article states) need to be taken into account.
> A lot of the Mac vs. Windows scenario is more a myth than anything else. Look at the actual market shares in 1984 or 1985 and what they are now (hint: the C64 was a bigger player than the Mac).
You are confused.
The Mac came out in 1984, and Windows 1 in 1985.
We are talking about the 90's, and Windows certainly crushed Mac during that era (and most of the early 2000's too).
And since Mac's world wide market share hovers around 6%, you can probably still argue that Windows continues to crush it today.
No, I am not confused. MS-DOS / PC-DOS already had a significant share. The Macintosh was never dominant in the market. Calling Windows something new ignores the relationship between MS-DOS and Windows (ask the DR-DOS people).
Please look at the situation on the computer market. Apple takes less than 10% of it, but an incredibly high part of the profits (about 80% of the hardware profit overall). Why? Because today an high-end computer is basically a Mac. Nobody spends money on a PC. And when you buy a 500$ PC, only Microsoft really makes a profit.
Now see the parallel to the phone market. Almost all high-end phones are iPhones. Really, who gives a damn of the overall market share? Apple takes all the money anyway. Other makers are in a cut-throat battle for market shares with razor thin margins, while Apple literally swims in cash.
Microsoft made plenty of money from PCs, and plenty more selling Office on the Mac (more than Apple made on the hardware at some points), and from leveraging that marketshare into browsers, corporate messaging, servers, Xboxes (well I don't think they've actually made any money on Xbox yet, but they probably will make some eventually) etc.
Google is making plenty of money from Android, and are making money from mobile search/ads on iPhone too. It seems likely that the growth of Android, and the fact that low end Anrdroids are expanding the market for mobile browsing/search/ads is only going to aid their bottom line going forward.
Do you view Apple as simply a hardware manufacturer? Why not calculate the margins that LG and Samsung are making on the components of the iPhone 4 and just pretend that the money Apple makes doesn't count, just like apparently Microsoft's profits don't count when a laptop gets sold?
I simply want to accentuate the fact that Apple doesn't need a big part of the overall phone market to grab most of the margin available to this market. It simply needs to stay at the top. When LG sells an android phone, LG makes a couple of bucks of margin at best; google gets pennies from advertising; in contrast when Apple sells an iPhone, they get quite a hefty global hardware and software profit.
Disagree. After the initial smartphone surge of the last 3 years, most of the growth, revenue, and profit in the cell phone market will come from poor consumers outside the first world. It's hard to sell a new iPhone every year to first world consumers who already have an iPhone: it's fast enough and has every HW feature under the sun already. Sooner or later people will stop paying for roughly the same electronics in a redesigned case (no matter how sexy).
Will Apple accept much lower margins to capture the emerging market? I doubt it, but we'll see. If they don't: they need to keep inventing new product categories like the iPad to keep the whole thing afloat, and that is definitely not sustainable. I think they are nearing a top.
IMO "poor consumer in the third world" aren't that different from us. As soon as they can they want Adidas sneakers, Mercedes cars, Louis Vuitton bags and they'll want iPhones too.
About the sustainability : I think that the whole capitalist thing is pretty much unsustainable anyway. So what applies to Apple applies to everything else the same. So consider I'm talking there "all other things equal".
Money quote. If Android were serious about their developers, they would bake in standard animations. Make it easier for developers to build good-looking and good-feeling apps, fragmentation issues aside. The beauty of UIKit is if you think like an Apple Engineer (see WWDC10 'Designing Apps with Scrollviews'), you can build almost all of the user interfaces and apps that are standard. Even iMovie. They give you the tools to succeed. No other conference I've been to (WWDC10) was it so apparent they want to give you the framework and knowledge and expert advice to build apps that look good. Apple loves its developers. Not sure about Google's love for their Android developers.
> Emotion is a huge factor when people choose what to buy — I’d say maybe even the biggest one. Apple understands this. All iOS devices — all Apple devices, for that matter — are designed with the emotional experience in mind. Why does almost everything in iOS animate? Why did Apple create CoreAnimation, and base UIKit app development so heavily upon it? Because animation, even in small unobtrusive doses, has an emotional affect. It results in a feeling.
People like to glorify Apple in every way possible and tout whatever advantages they have but the mistake they make is they don't care enough to understand Android as a platform and its Architecture. Because if they did they will understand that from an developer standpoint Android is absolute delight to develop on.
Think about this - when Android goes to tablets with Honeycomb, the same app binary will work with tablets and phones while automagically adjusting the UI to suit the available screen real estate. Now think how Apple did this with iPad.
Think about inter-app communication. Intents are another one of the great platform facilities. Your app can get things done at runtime without worrying about if there is an app installed to handle that intent - if there isn't one it will launch the Market app and suggest you to download the necessary app to handle that activity. The cloud Backup APIs and C2DM stuff is way ahead than what Apple has to offer today.
Then there are obviously the notifications. Ever heard any one complain about Apple's horrid notification system? Nope - they are all busy looking at UI animations :)
Not having to deal with memory management is added bonus.
There are a lot of things Android gets right. If they don't have as many rich animations as iOS it doesn't make a whole lot of difference to end users - having crappy notifications on other hand does affect end users negatively.
So all put together I think there are lot many pleasant things to say about Android as a development platform. Purely from an "emotional" or "UI" angle it may not be terrific but from an getting work done fast standpoint it surely is a great platform that also happens to look decent enough not to make you puke ;)
> If they don't have as many rich animations as iOS it doesn't make a whole lot of difference to end users.
Actually, that makes much, much more of a difference to end users than notifications systems or "intents" (both of which, I freely admit, are very awesome). Try a demo for five minutes with an Android phone and an iPhone. Even if the Android phone was more productive in the long run -- and I'm not sure it will be, but let's say that it is -- the pretty UI will win every time.
> the same app binary will work with tablets and phones while automagically adjusting the UI to suit the available screen real estate
Is that a good thing? I'm inclined to say that it's not. With a click of a button in the IDE, you can convert your iPhone app to an iPad app, having the OS scale up the UI for you -- it's just a horrible experience. It's not a tablet application. It's an application designed for phone usage patterns, with text columns too wide to read, and reasonably unusable.
The iPad Human Interface Guidelines say that "The differences between Mail on iPhone and Mail on iPad reflect the different user experiences of each device." You can use one binary for both interface idioms, but trying to use the same interface, or a slightly changed one, just ends up in a horrible app. I don't want to use a tablet with auto-scaled phone applications, and if that's what Honeycomb makes developer think is somehow a good thing, then shame on it for ruining the Android tablet experience.
> Ever heard any one complain about Apple's horrid notification system?
I hear complaints all the time. It is awful beyond belief. There is no way to deny that. So was the lack of multitasking about this time last year. That was fixed.
> Not having to deal with memory management is added bonus.
I develop for the iPhone, and I don't "deal" with memory management. I follow two rules: release what you own, don't release what you don't. (I actually like dislike garbage construction because it causes issues with destructors and non-memory resource management, but that's a different point.)
> So all put together I think there are lot many pleasant things to say about Android as a development platform.
I agree. There are. But I don't think it's inherently better than iOS, although the Java roots might make it much more familiar to a large section of the programming population (that, however, might also use some experience in a new type of dynamic language).
Fair points except that the prettiest UI doesn't always win - more productive, more flexible UIs that look decent enough do. And I don't think Android in itself has any limitation that prevents a developer from creating pretty looking apps.
Also GC mostly is huge benefit when it is available - like everything it has its downside as you rightly pointed out, but I prefer that over having to remember to release memory in different code paths. Gives me more time to think about program logic. Plus you can always write native code in NDK when you want more control over object deallocation for performance critical code.
Call it on an object, and it'll release itself (and its memory) sometime in the future, after the current call stack (probably sometime a few runloops ahead). Most things come pre-autoreleased for you, the only time you ever have to manage memory yourself is if you are storing it inside the instance variables of an object, at which point you just have to remember to add a line to the destructor to free it.
Think about this - when Android goes to tablets with Honeycomb, the same app binary will work with tablets and phones while automagically adjusting the UI to suit the available screen real estate. Now think how Apple did this with iPad.
That may be wonderful for developers, but that will probably make for a horrible user experience.
No it won't make a bad experience for anyone. See the AllthingsD video interview with Andy Rubin for a demo. GMail app on the tablet is displayed taking full advantage of extra screen real estate by placing its views side by side. Same app goes on a phone and places its view once screen at a time, new view (view mail for e.g.) activated by click for example. This is exactly what iPad apps do, only that in case of Android one binary will do the right thing on tablet and phones.
That's different though. http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/resources/introductiontoun... says - "A Universal app is optimized to run on all iPhone OS devices—itʼs essentially an iPhone app and an iPad app built as a single binary." It also lays the responsibility of conditional coding to the apps - to load right resources, show split view by following different code paths etc.
There are no two apps in case of Android, only one App with no conditional coding required to support a tablet and a phone. The underlying framework will do the right thing automatically based on where it is running.
The rather extraordinary claim that a future version of android will be able to "automagically" adjust the UI to suit screen size needs some serious evidence to back it up.
Obviously, the operating system is not going to be able to produce the same design decisions that would be made in light of actual experimentation with real users - it will be based on heuristics that will produce sub-optimal results for just about any combination of screen size and resolution other than the original. So I'll assume that you merely meant to assert that the scaling will produce results that are "good enough" in that normal users won't notice that the UI doesn't fit their tablet.
Even the claim that it will be "good enough" seems outlandish. Consider the kinds of scalable GUIs that exist on desktops: the important elements of the GUI (like toolbars, menus, and standard buttons) don't get re-sized. At best, they get wrapped or scrolled, either of which is instantly recognizable as a bad design. Most of the sizing flexibility on desktop apps is in the areas that show relatively static content that the user only interacts with passively, like in a web browser or video player, or in the case of many types of games, areas that you only interact with in small bits at a time. (Word processors alternate between the presentation of static content and the interaction (ie. editing) of one spot at a time.)
On a multitouch display with direct manipulation of the GUI, you will typically have far fewer opportunities for the easy scalability that web browsers and word processors enjoy. You have to know which UI elements need to maintain the same physical size, which ones need to maintain the same pixel dimensions, and what the limits are on the scalability of the other elements.
Take as an example the iPad email app. In landscape mode, you have a list of messages on the left (showing subjects, the first line of the body, and a few other pieces of info), and the body of the currently selected message shown on the right. The right pane takes up about 2/3 of the screen width.
If you were to scale this app from the 4:3 iPad display to a 16:9 tablet, how would the left/right split ratio have to change? It's complicated: the entries in the left-side list will have to maintain roughly the same physical height, because they are essentially buttons. You probably want the left pane to remain at least as many characters wide as in the original, so the physical width won't change by much, but you have some flexibility in font sizes. That means that the right pane showing the body of the email will probably be slightly wider and shorter on a 10" 16:9 tablet, but on a significantly smaller tablet, the left/right split might be 50/50.
All that is merely a first approximation of how that one app would have to scale. Could a computer derive that? How will the operating system know what the driving constraints are? The OS certainly can't know whether it is better on average to use the extra width of the 16:9 tablet to show more of the subject lines on the left or more of the body on the right.
It seems that the only way to make a scalable touch UI work is for the designer to bake in the constraint information, which will require testing at different sizes. This obviously doesn't save any work if you are only targeting two sizes. How many different sizes do you need to target before the rule-based scaling has a significant advantage over manually tuning the different sizes? Whatever that number, Android will exceed it and Apple probably won't. However, this completely ignores the need for more drastic design changes when the difference in sizes is very big, such as between the iPhone and the iPad.
And such discontinuities in the scaling hardly require that big a disparity: according to AnandTech's review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4062/samsung-galaxy-tab-the-an...) which is a 7" 16:9 tablet, the best way to type on it is in portrait orientation using your thumbs, whereas on the iPad (9.7" 4:3) you are better off using both hands in landscape. On a 10" 16:9 tablet, you have even more width in landscape mode to accommodate typing with both hands, but how is the OS supposed to know that in portrait mode it is still too wide for two-thumb typing?
The only really good scalable UI engine I know of is LaTeX, which outputs completely static content, but can handle a wide range of paper sizes without the author needing to worry about margins, and all the font sizes can be scaled with a single change to the header of the source file. Even so, it doesn't know when the paper size is large enough that you should switch to a two-column format.
It's not just about scalable UI. The Android concept is of fragments. Quoting from the allthingsd interview of Rubin -
"[Fragments] allow apps to split their functionality on varying devices. In other words, the Gmail app on an Android phone will load your inbox on one page, then slide to a new screen to display an email. On an Android tablet, that very same app will display completely differently, loading the inbox in a left-hand pane and using most of the screen real estate for emails. Rubin stressed that Android engineers have thought hard about making sure apps are backwards compatible with phones but still run well on tablets. Rubin started to talk about how fragments will work on Google TV before switching topics--we’re guessing he was simply going to specify that some apps will fragment to take advantage of the TV platform as well."
Android already does flow based layout by default, taking its cue from the web itself. Web apps have been dealing with this problem space for many years, and in some ways have conquered it.
Web apps are definitely the place to start looking for solutions, since they always have resizing forced on them. But very few web apps can handle a lot of resizing (particularly down to phone resolutions) without ending up looking like they're obviously the wrong size. This shouldn't be too much of a problem for apps designed to start at WVGA or smaller, but like most things Web-related, it still completely ignores the touch aspects.
iOS has the concept of "autoresizing", which allows for relatively simple flow-based UI. Could you explain (or link to) Android's implementation of the concept? I'm interested to see how it works.
With respect to technology, the problem with Android is the exact problem with Linux on the desktop. The Surface Graphics Manager and Surface Graphics Library are just not as good as Quartz and CoreAnimation.
"I've played with friends' Evos and I can definitely notice the jerkiness in scrolling the app marketplace."
GC is far more likely cause for the jerkiness. The 2.2 and below GC implementation is not very latency friendly. They fixed that in 2.3 with concurrent GC with a target GC pause of 3ms. Looking at 2.3 on Nexus S - there are literally no user visible pauses / jerkiness - I just can't bog it down.
GPU acceleration may be useful in some specific cases and I am sure they will get there - but having to support bazillion devices that have different GPUs - that's going to take little longer.
As a developer, I like Android. I really do. I'm pulling for it. But as someone who has helped develop a first class Android application, the hardware fragmentation is the largest headache I've had to deal with. Even pulling out all performance enhancing techniques, it is hard to deliver an experience on a G1 running Android 1.6.
I want Google to take a firmer stance around the hardware that powers their devices. Call it brand protection, a licensing requirement or just plain "we're better at tech than you." Please, just make the phones work.
Oddly enough, it's Microsoft doing that, not Google.
The jerkiness is subjective - it's not an active problem to worry about or rely upon. So the market share of 2.3 isn't really a pressing issue.
G1 is a bad example - it is too weak spec wise. Aging hardware problem is not something anyone can do anything to resolve. With Google the pace of obsolescence is faster than Apple's but that's a fair price to pay and not many common apps are demanding enough to care about hardware specs. There is always going to be faster hardware and specialized software that exploits it - it's not a problem, just evolution that you got to manage.
Also now a days most Android phones do have decent enough hardware to not cause you the G1 class of headaches. So there isn't much to worry if you target 2.1+ phones which gives you 85% coverage.
The only solution for the developers of that uncommonly demanding app is to have minimum specs requirement for the app. And I have heard that Honeycomb will come with base minimum hardware requirements - but that may be a moot point as already most Android devices have decent hardware now a days.
My iPhone 2G on iOS 3.0 can scroll a list smoothly. Every brand new Android phone (possibly excluding the Nexus S -- I haven't yet used one) cannot. Sadly, since I still see devices stuck on 2.1, 2.0, or even 1.6, that fix will not come to everyone soon (or, for some devices, ever).
Subject to devices in use, firmware they are running etc. My Nexus One, Galaxy S with TouchWiz UI, or the Nexus S do not have jerky scrolling for instance. The G1 does. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xEKrY0VQKQ
So it is possible today for people to buy Android devices and not notice any out of the ordinary jerkiness.
Sounds like what people said about buying American cars in the mid 80's. It was quite possible to buy a great, reliable American car. Unfortunately, other cars in the group pulled down the perception of those cars as a group, in sharp contrast to perceptions of Japanese car makes.
>If Android were serious about their developers, they would bake in standard animations.
Why do you presume that they haven't? Every View has intrinsic full animation support, and of course there's a full simile of CoreAnimation in android.view.animation.
So why don't Android apps make use of it? Generally as a function of time, care, and craftsmanship. Too often Android apps were second tier, and many Android app writers were doing it to scratch an itch (versus for the iPhone where it is typically productized).
Android apps have the potential to be just as slick, just as polished, and just as nuanced and emotional as any iphone app. The state today is that they aren't, but that isn't any intrinsic failure of the platform.
Honestly, though, I find that sort of observation superficial and just incredibly boring. Every iphone user when they touch an Android device will immediately comment on the lack of slickness of the non-GPU using transitions. As a day to day Android user, using my phone for virtually everything and anything, this has absolutely ZERO impact on my enjoyment of the device. To say it is unnoticed is still giving it too much credit. It's superficial bedazzling that differentiates based upon the utterly irrelevant.
Looking only at the functionality and completely ignoring the design is superficial.
Animations are a core part of the design, they make it much easier for normal people to understand transitions and spatial interfaces in the UI, e.g. when going from one screen to another in a hierarchy. And they make it look nicer. (When was the last time a consumer bought a car by specs instead of by looks?)
First we had text-based UIs (hello /bin/sh). Then we had static GUIs. Now we have animated GUIs. Many old-school unix gurus couldn't see the need for GUIs, e.g. BrianK said "What You See Is All You Get" about WYSIWYG because he thought GUIs were more limited than text-based UIs. But for normal people, the 'G' in GUI was the important letter and is what enables them to use the computer.
>Looking only at the functionality and completely ignoring the design is superficial.
Who is completely ignoring the design? My comment was specifically and only about essentially spurious, extraneous chrome -- literally interface bedazzling. It has nothing whatsoever to do with usability, and actually little to do with design.
You know I still marvel that Apple is held as the gold standard of design. The iPhones notification system is truly terrible. The messaging system is a god awful sin of design (for the longest time I simply could not believe that the screenshots posted were actually from the esteemed iPhone). Many of the transition effects stink of excess.
I downvoted you for asserting that animations have nothing to do with usability or design, and that they are "nothing more than interface bedazzling." Animations and movement can communicate a lot. They can give a sense of place and aid navigation, especially in "Navigation-based" apps (those with that left-pointing button in the top-left). They can enhance the perceived speed of the software. They can be annoying if abused, and on iOS I do not believe they are. They can lend a touch of consistency and increase the perceived value of the software or entire device. And that's off the top of my head.
I actually said "My comment was specifically and only about essentially spurious, extraneous chrome", which you extrapolated, and got upvotes, for misrepresenting as "animations have nothing to do with usability or design". Kudos on your misdirection.
What do you consider to be particularly egregious examples of this? I know you mentioned the push notification UI, but can you elaborate, or point out some other cases where Apple's design aesthetic "stinks of excess"?
One person's excess is another's necessity. I haven't spent more than 10 minutes with an iPhone, so I'll comment on what I'm familiar with: Compiz. A lot of hackers call the wobbly windows effect in Compiz a waste of resources for a purely visual effect. Without wobbly windows, however, everything feels stiff to me. My workflow is more fluid with wobbly windows, making me more productive.
I'd be interested in your take on this. The issue is not whether it is the lack of GPU or GC overhead - it is the smoothness (Apple's gold standard is 60fps).
> I agree with the common opinion here... It is very hard to pitch Android to someone who is not tech savy, simply because of the choppy and sluggish UI. This has also become the talk of the masses, most people who haven't even used Android say the following: "I've seen Android, its cool, but its not as smooth and stable as the iPhone." The iPhone's hardware fails a lot (I've exchanged my 3Gs twice in less than a year), it also freezes at times and drops calls, but what do people see and remember!? UI!! If android wishes to ever compete seriously with iOS, GPU acceleration is a must!
As someone who will likely be doing a considerable Android port from scratch (hopefully one that does not suck too much) in the first half of next year, thank you for this intel. I think the iPhone user smugness starts at the very beginning - with the swipe to unlock. As Jerry Seinfeld (somewhat incorrectly) riffed in his latest show - "With these new phones you can't get all mad and yell <expletive> and slam the phone down - it has to be (Jerry pantomimes yelling on the phone and then gently swiping to hang up). Jerry also had a brilliant observation on how he goes to lunch with friends and they have their Blackberry in hand and they might be looking at you but they're really not - he termed it - they have painted doll eyes. But I digress, I believe long-term (2011) that you will not be taken seriously if you cannot deliver an Android app. A mobile web site is a poor substitute - and most defy my 1st law of mobile apps - the ability to work with it offline..
The animations subtract value because they waste the only thing that matters in life: time. I don't have an iPhone, but I assume most of the animations are mandatory, and that is completely aweful.
Dunno.. perceived quality?
I (as an Android user) really hope that devs will focus on Android app quality. Currently, most of them feel like ports or something..
At the end of the day, the only metric by which Apple will be ahead of the competition for a while is profit. They have already lost on all other axes that I can count on, so get ready to hear "profit" trumpeted left and right by Apple sycophants for the next five years.
Gotta love Gruber. He makes good points, but at the end of the day he falls back on the intangibles like emotion. Apple does consistently make superior products and have succeeded in cultivating an emotional fanbase, but emotion don't mean much. There has been plenty of companies with rabid fans who have died before.
Plus, linking to a Nexus S "line" that the photographer admits was posed? Here's some numbers. There are 323 Apple Stores in the world. There are over 1,150 Best Buys. That is Apple's real problem. They can evoke all the emotion they want, but they picked a battle against the entire industry. I doubt they can remain the profit leader for long.
When he talks about emotion, Gruber is not referring to a rabid fan base in love with a company. He's talking about the simple satisfaction that comes from flicking a UITableView and watching it scroll with inertia. I have an iPhone and have observed a lot of friends/family (who don't know or care a whit about Apple or Android) just take pleasure from flicking around the contact list or using multi-touch to resize a photo (that always draws wows). Hell, kids even enjoy the UI gesture to unlock the phone.
Android does this to a certain degree but it's obvious from the level of polish that their focus is not on these small things.
And, BTW, that's fine - for someone like me, I'd rather see the stuff that Android is making progress in - but for many people, the iPhone UI still has that special 'something' that can't be described or measured.
"but they picked a battle against the entire industry" - That's an excellent point which is often ignored. When you set yourself up to do everything on your own (OS, CPU, Other hardware design etc. in case of Apple) that poses serious scalability challenges and it of course exposes you to more and more competition from all directions.
They are basically pissing off everyone - so they still don't have a free navigation app with turn-by-turn to compete with Google and they will struggle for some time to get that done. Now they got to do their own ads too. Own CPU too - so it's going to be longer than competitors to get a great dual core ARM CPU out. I understand there are different teams and Apple can hire as many people as they want but in reality it just doesn't scale in the long term. (They still need to shuffle teams between OS X and iOS as far as I can tell.)
But Apple knows they cannot play the numbers game - so they will stay a #2 or #3 and get away with it by increasing their profitability - that's a no brainer. But how it affects their competence in delivering new features and hardware advances against competitors - that remains to be seen.
I wouldn't be so quick to discount the idea of doing everything on your own. (Besides, they aren't exactly making all of the components on their own...just ones they believe they can improve upon)
Judging by Apple's rapid increase in portable computer sales in the last decade, I think many would say "picking a battle against the entire industry" hasn't worked out too terribly for them. Apple's one-model approach for mobile devices (with a small set of possible hardware configurations) has and will continue to pay off big for development purposes and will allow for more advanced features to be integrated thoroughly and simply across the platform more quickly (examples - GPS & gyro now & touch sensitive back & NFC technologies in the future).
The bottom line is that I would expect Android to continue to push the industry forward on many specification style features like high quality cameras, speedy hardware, and storage space while the iPhone will have more "leapfrogging" features like the examples listed above. Android software implementations will probably continue to be piecemeal while the iPhone implementations will be more thoughtful yet limited. (example - push notifications & UI)
Just to be sure, I wasn't discounting them - as I said it remains to be seen how they scale to the DIY challenges that I mentioned. Also the impact of any limitations resulting from these scale issues (if they prove to be a problem) may not be that much in terms of lost sales - as more than anything Apple's success lies in building brand loyalty and the Apple customers may choose to live with those limits. But it will pose problems for them if they target rapid sales growth outside the US.
Apple's ability to smoothly (re)use OS X components for iOS and vice-versa seems like a big plus. They can easily move staff around if need be, and the best features move back and forth quickly.
iPhones get sold in lots of places, but on launch day of a new model they are apparently banned from advertising that they have stock.
I read that at the last launch in London, the queue for the Apple store went past several independant stores that had iPhones in stock.
It's all a tacky PR stunt which you would think was beneath them. Why Gruber has recenty become fixated on this as an indicator of platform health I have no idea, it's like reviewing a movie based on how long some geek in a costume is prepared to wait outside a theatre.
Certainly Nike volumes are dwarfed by chinese shoes makers, but who gets the money in the end? A company is all about profit, not revenues. Apple gets an astounding part of the industry's profits, and that's what counts.
Plus, linking to a Nexus S "line" that the photographer admits was posed?
The long lines for the latest Apple release are an indictment of the Apple fanbase. They should never been seen as a benefit of the platform.
I see the same thing about the endless gloating about Apple profit. "Hey everybody, look at how much I overpaid! I surely picked the right horse to back!" It's a bit incredible.
No. I'm suggesting that the media manipulation is a negative. That Apple customers actually haven't caught onto this is yet another negative.
The modern world is amazingly capable of huge feats of fulfillment without demanding that the hordes line up for the cameras at 5am. That practice is a ridiculous anachronism.
You're over thinking it. The people who line up at 5am are doing it because for them it's amusing to be involved in the event, not because they're victims of mass hysteria.
Sure, you or I might fine it strange that people do this but so what? What you've written smacks of the tired depiction of Apple customers as marketing victims.
I have a friend who is an avid apple user, however she got a super cheap deal from her wireless company for an android phone. And as she says she can install the apps she really cares about (facebook e.t.c.) so sure she might prefer an iphone but cost wise as far as she's concerned she'd be mad to turn down the android because it's "good enough".
And from a development point of view, it's not as if we can easily cross compile apps from one platform to another so with limited resources we have to choose. iPhone or Android, at the moment the calculation is iPhone first Android second, if that changes, and with sheer weight of numbers on Androids side it might, Apple should probably be worried about drifting into irrelevancy.
I don't understand the logic here. An "avid apple user" went with an Android phone despite the apparent strong emotional connection she has with the Apple experience. How is that not something to worry about?
Because in the end Apple can always lower their price to Android level and own the entire market, because they have the better product. Beyond that, the public sees Apple as the coveted device, and Android as the "good enough" device. Apple is the leader, Android is the follower. A company in this position is going to have the most success introducing new products and new variations of products, since they have the most goodwill.
In my opinion Apple does need to worry about Android. Android is improving at a faster rate than iOS and is gaining faster momentum. Developers are catching on and more are starting to see the potential behind Android. However the biggest advantage for Android is price and variety. At Virgin Mobile you can get an Android device, Samsung Interceptor, for under $200 with no contract and pay just $25/month for unlimited data and 300 minutes, taxes included. That's amazing. I love my iPhone 4, but if Virgin Mobile had a slightly better Android phone like a Droid than I'd be tempted to switch. Sure Apple has the emotional appeal, but how can you argue with saving $1000+ over 2 years? Apple needs a stronger argument with the iPhone. The iPod touch and iPad are priced very aggressively. That's why it's difficult for competition to get a hold. But in my opinion the iPhone is overpriced and Apple is raking in the profits. Why is the iPhone priced $400 more than a iPod touch? Doesn't make sense. Its price abuse. Apple should price the iPhone more aggressively. And get some variety out there.
Warning: I'm an Apple fanboy, so take my opinion for what it's worth...
I wasn't always a fanboy. In fact, prior to my iPhone 3G purchase last year, I'd never owned an Apple product. At present, my family has 2 3G's, a 4 (probably another in a week), an iPad, a Mac Mini, and an iMac.
Why do I say this? Apple converted me into an Apple buyer for life because of the experience they provide from purchase to use. It's more expensive, but I willingly pay it because I know what I'm getting, each and every time.
The iPhone works because you can't see it without being impressed. The Android is good, possibly really good (at the higher price range), but it's not great, and with the fragmentation, bloatware, and lack of controlled user experience, I don't think it can ever be great. This is why the iPhone won't go away.
Should Apple be worried? Probably...I think they'll need a few tricks up their sleeves in order to a) keep their casual users and b) keep some semblance of their current market share.
Google isn't in this for apps in the same way that Apple is, they're in it for search, which is what makes the game a bit lopsided. However, I think that's the same reason that Apple will prevail.
I can't say how it will shake out, but there's got to be something said for devotion, both from a producer and consumer side of things.
I'd been a Windows dev for years. Never touched anything Apple (never really thought about them at all, to be honest), until 5 years ago when I got sick of my wife complaining about me always fiddling with the computer ("I never know where anything is 'cause you keep changing everything all the time") so I decided to buy her a Mac. Idea being I'd heard they were pretty simple so she'd be ok on it, and I wouldn't touch it because, well... it was a Mac
Then I decided that I'd better figure out hoe to use it in preparation for the inevitable "How do I do [some task]?"
Fast forward to now, and that iMac is still out main machine but we've also got a macbook, an iPod Nano, a 1st gen iPod touch, 2nd gen iPhone, 3rd gen iPhone, 4th gen iPod Touch and an old Apple TV.
Oh, and my using the Mac has developed in me an appreciation for unix which has led to a love for Linux
> Why do I say this? Apple converted me into an Apple buyer for life
I felt exactly the same after a few years with my Apple ][ more than twenty years ago. I was a die hard Apple fan back then.
But today's Steve Jobs scares me.
And now that Apple has shown its true colors (you know, "we can't have an app that mentions Android in our app store, sorry"), I'm certainly happy that Android is out there to give Apple a run for its money.
As for you being a "lifetime" fan... we will see. I'm pretty sure you will grow out of it at some point.
There's some kind of Zeno's Paradox that applies to competing with Apple.
Android (for example) can start off with ugly hardware that's missing vital components and a half-finished OS and no apps and Apple fans will, quite rightly, point out these flaws. They'll maybe go further and assume the platform will fail because of these things.
Fast-forward a couple of years and Android sales are soaring, often despite these issues, which while mostly solved, may not have trickled down to the actual Android using masses yet.
You would assume that with that rate of change, it's only a matter of time before Android will surpass iPhone which doesn't seem to have changed quite as much. Instead you find that now the reasons they will never pass Apple are actually subjective and non-quantifiable notions of elegance, emotion and class (also, oddly, the ability to get geeks lining up to be the first to buy mass-produced devices sold in the tens of millions per year). And despite butt-ugly hardware and software not stopping Android in its 1.5 days, the near imperceptible (if not actually preferable) differences between 2.3 and iOS4 will forever hold them back.
Another great article by John Gruber. It makes me laugh when people thinks Apple is going to fail based solely on % numbers without considering the growth of the market itself.
Apple didn't single-handedly invigorate (if not invent) two forms of consumer-class electronics in the 90's, and they didn't have strong leadership to continually innovate on their leads.
Android could be the new 1995-era Windows; but who's saying Apple is the same Apple?
I don't think Apple is going to get into the same situation they got into in the 90's. I was just replying to his argument, that growth of the overall market makes up for loss of percentage, with a counterexample. I personally think you have to consider a lot of other factors.
Apple barely got above 10% market share with the Mac since 1984. Even that high was done using tactics that left the company "beleaguered", and at any rate, Steve Jobs wasn't at the helm when that happened.
It's really not valid to compare Apple now to Apple pre-Steve Jobs.
A lot of those predicting Apple's doom (or simply decline) or a repeat of the OS wars are ignoring the power of Apple's supply chain. As Gruber puts it: if Android can make a great $100 handset why can't Apple?
The point about the cost of service contracts is worth repeating: the difference between an iPhone 4 or a free handset is about 10% of the total cost so price of the isn't all that important.
You see the power of Apple supply chain with the iPad. Apple (IMHO) had no real inkling of just how big it was going to be, just like they didn't know wit the original iPhone. Now volume is more of a known quantity Apple has a lot more room to increase specs and/or lower price with the anticated revision.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab (so far the most credible competitor) offers a screen half the size at a $600 price point. That's the power of Apple's supply chain.