Android, hope and skepticism
So I finally finished reading that massive Wired piece on Android. Which, more or less, was filled with a lot of not that much actual information or insight, but with a lot of rah, rah, Google Android’s the shiz niiiit. Still it got my brain monkeys running around.
Ultimately, I remain skeptical that Android will be ragingly successful or paradigm shifting or what not. I suspect that it will become another reasonably successful competitor in an increasingly crowded field of smartphones playing second fiddle to the iPhone.
Design by committee
It’s first problem is that it has a ton of players in it’s alliance. These allies are often competitors with each other. These allies have conflicting requirements, not least is the desire of the carriers to actually prevent as much freedom as possible for the actual users of Android. They like having all the control over what you can and can not do on their networks, it’s how they make their money.
Freedom v. control
That control is important - the article hints at this, but doesn’t really get into whether or not Android actually requires the ability to load whatever software you want. That is, if the carriers are free to customize the OS as they see fit, can they customize it to allow only the apps they want to allow on it? Presumably, even if they do this, enterprising hackers can load a diff’t version of the OS on it, but that won’t be a mainstream event.
Write once, run everywhere?
The other problem is that it hopes to be everything to everyone. Any tech, any specs, it’ll all run Android! Yay! But how do you program for that? I know on the Treos, shifting from one screen size to the next was a major event. Here, potentially there’s tons of different screen sizes - it isn’t like a PC where at this point screens are all large enough for anything, on phones you can have really tiny screens to only somewhat tiny screens and you need to optimize very specifically for the sizes. A design made to work on an iPhone sized screen isn’t going to work on a RAZR’s screen at all, it won’t even work on a Treo sized screen. So how does that work? And that doesn’t even count different input methods, touch screen? RIM style roller ball? 5 way directional? Only a numeric keypad?
Ultimately, I just don’t see how this convergence of problems results in something that sets the world on fire the way, say, the iPhone did and continues to do. Like it or not, the iPhone changed the game, look at the RIM Bold with it’s fancy browser, or Samsung’s Instinct all touchscreeny goodness. It put Helio out of business where the Ocean was initially touted as so much better than the iPhone.
Hope
But believe me, I’d like to see Android succeed I really like to see some competition in this space. In some ways, it has already been a game changer. The potential freeing of Symbian while maybe somewhat a reaction to the iPhone seems much more a reaction to Android and it’s openness.
I think a likely medium term scenario for Android is that 2 or 3 general hardware sets settle into a “standard”. Basically a set of screen sizes, horsepower and input methods that developers will be able to build to and be convinced that it will work on most android phones. There probably won’t in general be all that many handsets, with a few most popular models dominating sales and each carrier customizing (read hobbling) the OS in their own proprietary fashion.
Skepticism
I’m tired of seeing Apple being it’s own competition. I hope RIM’s stepped up game as evidenced by the Bold lives up to the hype. I hope Palm actually launches its next generation linux based OS and it is actually good. I hope Android comes out and rocks my socks off. I hope open Symbian turns that into an again thriving ecosystem. I hope all these things, but I kinda also don’t believe that they will. Of them all, I think RIM probably has the best shot, like Apple it owns the whole stack from hardware on up and it’s proven its ability to innovate. We’ll see. What about you, where’s the bright hope? Is Android going to dominate?
