Ever since Google introduced their Android operating system, many online bloggers said that it will “kill” iOS in a few years. True, the numbers of applications on the Android store is almost at the number in iOS App Store and the number of Android devices sold last year in the US beat iPhone sales by a large amount.
However, many fail to see that although Apple is a hardware and software manufacturer, Google isn’t. Google merely produces the software for other manufacturers to use — the only phone it makes itself is the Nexus (although arguably, it was HTC who made the Nexus One and Samsung has produced the current Nexus S).
This creates a situation where one cannot compare Android and iOS side-by-side. If we do compare both operating systems, then Apple has done extraordinarily well to keep such a high market share. Taking into account all the manufacturers who use the Android operating system, they greatly outnumber Apple.
Why is this? There is a simple explanation, as Windows has somewhat done with its new operating system, Apple standardises the hardware to be used with their software. This creates a synergy (apologies for the marketing-speak) which no other manufacturer can match. Google powered phones are slow, fragmented and clunky.
Now, before your Apple-fanboy radars start bleeping — just read any review of an Android phone, although the flexibility of such phones gets praise, they are let down by cheap hardware and generally clunky software. Apple hardware just works, because of the close link between the hardware and the software.
I feel that I may have slightly veered off the point, but I think that the explanations above prove that iOS and Android OS are nothing alike. The same thing goes for comparing Ubuntu to OSX, they simply are nothing alike at all. And they never will be anything alike: the chances that Apple will give out their software to other hardware manufacturers is basically none, and their premise that the iOS software is ‘open’ is completely ridiculous. (Andy Rubin’s tweet after Steve Jobs’ comment about openness highlighted this).
As mentioned, there are advantages to a closed system: e.g. Everything just works — but you have to figure that someone at Apple right now is worried about the impending force that is the open platform of Android. Developers want to make the most money and they aren’t going to choose a system which forces them to do certain things. Although this system has worked up to now, I think that soon, developers will leave the iOS platform and move to Android.
Then again, this all depends on what Apple releases hardware-wise in the coming years. With the preview of OS 10.7 earlier this year, the Mac is set to become a lot more exciting — the links between mobile and desktop computing have allowed Apple to produce an operating system which is probably like nothing we’ve ever seen. This is likely to drag developers back in.
Apple has a habit of creating things which we don’t know will be popular until a few months or years afterwards — they innovate. The question is, will their closed system and lack of diversity in the hardware sector hold them back? Or will further innovations in the App Store create a system that the likes of Google or Microsoft can’t even compete with: a fewe months ago, it seemed like the App Store would become the monopoly of the mobile app software sector that Microsoft once was in the desktop market, but more open systems have challenged Apple — only times will tell whether the totalitarian dictatorship or the primitive communism will rule.
