More Idiocy About Android & Apple

Over at PixoBebo.com, Kate Mackenzie has a wonderful happy argument that in the battle vs. Android, Apple can’t win.  I suspect this is written by someone born later than, so 1985, since the ground is the same as every “<insert name here> will destroy Apple” argument ever written.

The gist of the argument is that Apple is in defense mode against Android.  It can’t keep up with demand.  iPod revenue is being eaten by smartphones, etc.

But, seriously.  The first line of the post says it all. “Apple, Inc. is struggling.” Are you kidding me?  I think Wall Street and Apple’s market cap would argue differently.  Second largest company (not tech company, but company) in the country?  Struggling?  I’ll take some of these struggles?  And then the argument that inability to totally sate demand for products?  You might as well say that Apple is failing because too many people want their stuff.  Again, are you an idiot?

OK, though.  A credible argument can be had about the wisdom of keeping a closed ecosystem (as Apple is doing with the iPhone) or opening it and letting anyone with a chinese manufacturing plant put the OS on their machines (see: Android).  I think even Mr. Jobs would agree that there are trade-offs both ways. You could bring up Apple’s MacOS marketshare compared to Windows, etc.

But Apple’s not concerned about having fewer installed units than Android.  They’ve internally had that debate, and the fact is that Apple is not trying to just move units.  Apple makes great stuff, and while I have seen some cool stuff on Android (props to the boys over at gearbox.me), I have also seen streaming apps that I could not exit easily, and which ran my battery to zero in mere hours.  Apple is making high end German sports cars, and folks who are making Android machines are making Ford Focuses (Foci?).  There is not a battle here.

Moreover, I’ve been a devout Linux user since 2002 (a tinkerer for a few years before that), and the biggest challenge to making a move to Linux for everyday computing is not that it doesn’t work, but that the user experience is, shall we say, quirky.  It’s hard to get a bunch of people to agree on the right way to do something, and even harder to be sure that you’re doing it the way the masses want it.  It’s harder still to do this if you’re a distributed bunch of developers  without a large budget.  It’s a challenge of Open Source development, especially as hobbyists are developing the cool applications.

Android faces this challenge.  No one has built UI Guidelines, universal widgets, or a single, consistent (read: universal) user interactivity metaphor.  It may be (and in my experience, it is) a great environment for developers, but it is quirky for end users.  In a sense, Android is not so much Android as is it Motorola-Android, and HTC-Android, and Verizon-Android, etc.

Say what you want about units sold, but there is no battle here.  Apple is building a great device for users, and will sacrifice developer love to do so.  Android is a developer panacea, but sacrifices UI consistency for extensibility and flexibility.

Apple has always sided with user experience.  And they’re the 2nd largest US Corp for doing so.

You say that’s a problem, and I say you’re an idiot.