The Smartphone Ceasefire
Apple booster Daniel Eran Dilger wrote a long screed about how Apple rules and Google drools. He makes some good points (it’s hard to argue with Apple’s business acumen, while Google’s is genuinely more puzzling), though relies heavily on “they all said” when, in fact, I heard nobody say that. I’m sure somebody, somewhere said that Symbian would knock Apple off its pedestal, but I was pretty late to acknowledge Symbian’s utter collapse, it seemed like pretty much everybody was saying differently, and even I wasn’t saying that Symbian was going to eat Apple’s lunch. I just thought they would survive, and I was more optimistic than most people seemed at the time.
It coincides to some extent with what has become one of the overwhelming themes of the smartphone wars. Actually, not the wars, but the wars between boosters. A huge sense of defensiveness. It hasn’t exactly been symmetrical. Early on it was much more the Android fans that were defensive and were, in retrospect, by far the more hyper participants in arguments about which ecosphere was superior. Apple fans were less defensive and mostly dismissive. Dilger rallies a degree of defensiveness in the other direction.
Ultimately, the truths seem quite clear. Apple isn’t the only game in town, or the biggest in terms of marketshare, but its business model is amazingly profitable and that’s what matters. Both to Apple, and to an extent to its fans as it gives them something to point to. To Android fans, marketshare does matter and Android’s dominance there is the most important thing. Not as a bragging point, though it’s used as that, but mostly as a solidified alternative to Apple’s extremely limited range of smartphones.
Looking back at my own animosity towards Apple, I suspect that a lot of it was rooted in the fear that there actually wouldn’t be an alternative. Especially once Microsoft made clear that it was going much closer to the iPhone route (in terms of a restricted, closed OS), I was worried that Apple’s model was so effective that the Windows Mobile model actually wouldn’t have a successor.
But Android persevered, and I’m mostly past worrying about that. Even if Android were to falter, or be displaced by Tizen or something else, it’s been demonstrated that there is a huge market for alternatives to the iPhone. That the “fractured market” isn’t prohibitive and isn’t exclusive to a sufficiently intuitive, functional device that suits my needs (a flexible power device), the needs of my wife (a device with a keyboard that’s easy to use), and the needs of my family (a sufficient, inexpensive device).
If Google quits, someone else will step up. I am free to have device preferences that Apple doesn’t want to deliver on. Which, ultimately, is the primary problem I ever had with them. It wasn’t that their devices weren’t good. It was simply that they weren’t what I wanted. If it is what you want, you should absolutely get one. That, more than anything, has lead to a live-and-let-live attitude. For the most part. For the past year, excluding when Apple was trying to take my phone off the market, I have tried to take this to heart:
Nobody cares what kind of smartphone you believe in. It’s not a religion. It’s not your local sports team even. Stop being a soldier. You are not a soldier. You are just wrong. Shut up. You there, with the blog, in the comments, in the pages of the newspaper or the magazine or on Twitter or Facebook. Whatever your opinion is, as soon as you employ it in partisan fashion, it’s deeply and profoundly wrong. Just by sharing it, you are wrong. And nobody cares. Except for the people who do. And they are wrong too. Myself included.
“But, but, but,” I hear you stammering like some sort of horrible person who has mistaken a code base for a system of moral beliefs, “the screen is too big and not big enough.” No. You’re wrong. It’s just right. It’s just right for whoever is holding it, unless it’s not, in which case they’ll decide that it is wrong on their own and get a different one. And then they’ll be right, while you’ll still be wrong.
And I don’t care if Apple is brilliant, or stupid. I don’t care that they have no desire to produce the sort of phone I want to use. I don’t care if their screens aren’t as big as I would prefer. I don’t care if they have no keyboard, no external card, no removable battery. I don’t care if they block the sort of apps I want to use. None of that matters. Nor should it matter to Applytes that my phone sometimes crashes. Nor should they care if Google’s experiment with Motorola failed. Nor should they care if OS updates are less frequent. Nor should they care if I have to deal with bloatware that they don’t. Unless you’re considering buying one, it really doesn’t matter.
They’ve got their phone. I’ve got mine. And fortunately for all there is indeed plenty of room for both.
Yes, there’s no reason for the iOS and Android folks to bicker. Buy whichever attracts your eye and runs the software you need to run. However, we should give Mr. Jobs credit for iTunes and the App Store. It’s my own opinion that iTunes saved the music industry from itself, and the discovery that people would buy software (or accept it for free from someone with a business model) in little chunks changed the world.Report
As much as I hate to admit it, that’s exactly right. I always gave credit where credit was due to the iTunes store, since I didn’t have a particular interest (I went the Rhapsody route). I was slow to acknowledge the Appstore simply because there is so much about where Jobs took the smartphone industry that I don’t like, so I didn’t pay much attention to how he genuinely made things better (for everybody).Report
I am free to have device preferences that Apple doesn’t want to deliver on. Which, ultimately, is the primary problem I ever had with them. It wasn’t that their devices weren’t good. It was simply that they weren’t what I wanted.
Don’T yOU uNdERsTanD hOw tHe INTerNET WorKs?!?!
If It ISN’t thE WaY I LikE iT, It SUXXORZReport
Some screed indeed. Hmm, I’ve never actually met an Android booster in person; I’ve met several people who were/are emotionally identified with Apple, but only one who was/is obnoxious about it. Unfortunately, he is my boss – when I apostasized from iOS to Android last fall, he gave me this epic rant about how I would regret it, that within six months my Galaxy S4 would be slow and virus infested and I would come crawling back (none of those things have happened, of course, and I’m quite happy with my move). Strangely, he saves his active hatred for Google alone – while he expresses contempt for Samsung and Microsoft and anybody foolish enough to buy their products when there is an Apple offering, he doesn’t seem to have venom for them. I assume that’s the party line he gets with his koolaid shipments.
Agreed that for some/many people Apple’s products are better, although I suspect perhaps fewer than some Apple owners think. Case in point: my wife uses her phone (4S) for: phone, texting, photos, FB (rarely), facebook games, and the occasional web browsing (usually IMDB). She also has fairly severe presbyopia, and as result she has the phone zoomed it to the point that the screen is perhaps twelve characters wide in portrait (and frequently still has to hold it up close to read it). I’ve never seen her try to use the phone one-handed, where a much bigger screen might cause her problems (small handed friend of mine recently migrated from iPhone 5 to S4 and is generally very happy with the change, but he does use it one handed and has some trouble reaching his thumb all the way across), and there isn’t anything obvious in her use cases which would be especially harder in Android than in iOS. Perhaps the camera. But she is convinced that Android is bad bad bad – I have no idea from whom. I don’t particularly care, not being a booster, but I do find it odd.
Like you (Will), I only have animosity toward Apple when I am forced to use it *and* where there is a better alternative (almost always the case, except for a couple of years between the death of Windoze Mobile and the development of a rich enough Android ecology). But the fragmentation of the non-Apple market, which freeing up a tremendous amount of creativity, also gives Apple a substantial incumbent advantage via network effects – two examples:
It seems that most upper midrange cars now offer various sorts of iOS integration in their electronics sets. Other than Bluetooth connectivity for phone and audio, I haven’t heard about any offerings of Android integration. Makes business sense for the car makers – people with rather more money than
sensetech savvy are obviously going to buy Apple products 🙂I’ve come across a fair number of hospitals (dunno if Clancy’s fits in this category) where the IT department will only support iOS (plus Win7/8 and OS X) for connectivity to the enterprise WLAN; if I were a doctor with privileges I would effectively be required to use iOS for my phone.
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Android is a way, way better developer interface.
My $0.02Report
@scott-the-mediocre I was something close to an Android booster for a while. I’ve mostly relaxed, mostly due to the stuff in the OP. I’ve also come to appreciate that the iPhone is recommendable to a lot of people. When I see someone whose (non-low-end) Android phone still has the exact same default that it came with give or take the background image (which is often disjointed because the default clock was made for the default background image), I think that person would be better off getting an iPhone. And a little piece of me dies inside.
If there weren’t the issue of free tech support and the physical keyboard issue, I might even recommend an iPhone for Clancy. It seems unlikely that the physical keyboard issue is going to be an issue for much longer, though, as Android goes off in a different direction. The Stratosphere is dead. Will they ever release a Droid 5?
That period in between WinMo and Android getting up to speed was a dark time indeed. I clutched my WinMo for as long as I could. I never considered getting an iPhone. It just couldn’t do what WinMo could do dating back to 2005. The Android can’t do some of those things either (which there is just no excuse for), but at least gave me alternate ways of doing them. These days, there is all of one app that is iPhone only that I want. Meanwhile, there are tons of apps where it’s available on the Android but not the iPhone.
It would have been a whole lot simpler if my preferences simply had lined up with Apple’s.Report
As I always told my children, “Life is full of little disappoints.” One of mine is that I’ve been waiting 30 years for a hunk of 9x12x1/4-inch plastic and a stylus that can do a good imitation of a pad of paper and pen. I’ve got cramped little handwriting and my notes often enough include math, sketches of graphs, and line-and-box drawings to represent entities and communications. I’ve about given up hope that anyone will ever market it, and I’m not rich enough to undertake my own development.Report
the sports bar is terrible when it comes to politics, which can get people killed.
when it comes to phones it’s just the saddest song in the world.Report
You’re only saying that because you’re aching with regret that your phone isn’t as cool as mine.
(Actually, one of the funniest things that came out of the smartphone wars was when someone was talking about how we were “jealous” of his iPhone… as though they had a product we just can’t get and they had something just outright special. Note, this was not immediately after a release. I don’t know why this struck me as it did, but it outlined the absurdity of the whole thing. I could get an iPhone if I wanted one. They could get an Android. This isn’t a George Brett rookie card we’re talking about here.)Report
Actually, this day in age you can get a George Brett rookie card, too, quite easily and relatively inexpensively. (They used to be worth a couple hundred dollars and not easy to find!) Man, how times have changed.Report
i still have my gnex.Report
I have no experience with Apple phone products. My only expereince was with a computer many years ago. I liked the fact that the apple comp was fully compatibable and i could insert a mic and it’d work seamless vs the ibm version that had to have drivers and crap installed. However, the cost of the apple vs the ibm clone was what got me. For 500 to 1k more i get an apple and compatability. For less I have to install a driver, etc. I choose the cheaper price.
However, I do like very much my new ipod.
The phones, meh. it’s a phone. Apple’s are nice but expensive. There’s no value propsition for apples for me…Report