Neither Android nor Blackberry has hardware or software as well-designed as the iPhone's. One of Apple's major draws has always been its anal attention to detail, which RIM and Google don't share. Google has one of the worst track records regarding design, period.

Neither Android nor the Blackberry has a unified product. When I design for the iPhone I know the exact product dimensions, I know exactly how the user will be interacting with my program, and I know it will be the exact same a year or two from now. I can make one app that any iPhone owner can use and it will be used exactly as I want it used. With Android and Blackberry, that's not the case.

all apps are 1st class apps

Pardon my poor French, but what the fuck does that mean? I've seen Android apps and iPhone apps, and the Android apps are uglier and less elegant.

Most likely he means that Android developers don't need to deal with their apps being 2nd class citizens the way iPhone developers do. Unless you work for Apple:

1) You are restricted as to which parts of the SDK you can use.

2) Your app may be rejected for any reason, no reason, or whatever reason. The reason may or may not be explained, and may or may not make sense.

3) Even if it isn't rejected, it will still take weeks or months to get your app into the hands of customers.

None of this applies to Apple apps, of course. Therefore, independent developers are 2nd class citizens of the iPhone.

Gotcha. I'd misinterpreted the remark. Thanks!

What he means by all apps being first class is that it's really a dogfooded API and platform. Apple is pretty far from the "we build our own apps in the same sandbox you do" state that Android is in.

As an example: Twidroid (and most other Android apps) can run in the background, and use data in the background without a custom push server. Apple's Mail app, on the other hand, isn't buildable (for the iPhone) with the public APIs. You'd need to run in the background for that, which isn't available.

Don't judge the API based on the quality of apps you're seeing - I've seen some well-polished Android apps, and some legendarily horrible iPhone ones.

first class means that there is no priority in which apps can do what. Apps can be written for Android that completely replace core functionality, like the dialer or the contact list, or even the home screen. With the iPhone, there are multiple classes of apps, and anything not sanctioned by Apple takes a backseat to those apps provided or sanctioned by Apple. This is evidenced by the "duplicates functionality" limitation of the Apple vetted App store.

Have you seen some of the upcoming Android phones? As much as I hate Verizon, the Verizon Droid from Motorola looks like it'll be every bit as good hardware-wise as the current gen iPhones.

See here for a comparison of the Droid and the iPhone 3GS (http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/101909-droid-vs-iphone...)

Which is great and all, but the fact that you only need to develop for (effectively) one piece of hardware is still a huge competitive advantage for the iPhone vs. anything else. (Except the Pre, but the Pre has other problems.)

If you look at the way the Android SDK handles device differences, it's really much less of an issue that most people seem to make it out to be. Accommodating different resolutions, for example, is pretty trivial for an Android app developer. The only (IMHO) that might be an issue is the differences in input capabilities (ie, hardware keyboard or no hardware keyboard, trackball or no trackball, etc). That should no be an issue at all for productivity apps, but I do see how it could be an issue for games. It's hard to balance your level difficulties and design your play mechanics if you're not sure what kind of input device your players will be using.

I agree -- I think Grubber is missing the boat on the overall trends. Android OS devices will, guaranteed, outsell total number of iPhones in the not too distant future. Will it be 12 or 24 months? I don't know, but right now Google is knocking the ball out of the park on distribution deals: Apple and AT&T market the iPhone and its OS.

Sprint, T-mobile, Verizon, Barnes & Noble (through the Nook), HTC, etc. etc. all market Android OS and phones right now. Which group do you think will win?

Eventually the developers will come, especially because developing for Android is frankly easier for developers: significantly more open platform, and broader developer skills for Android's app SDK.

Right now, Android's Market app sucks (1.6's update is a bit better). Android Devices will vary more in terms of hardware, although Apple's are starting to differentiate as well. Apple had a pretty good Store app from the get-go, a single platform to develop for, a beautiful UI and almost no competition in the paid app space.

Apple pulled out in front, and they'll probably always have an arguably better product, if Steve keeps up his perfectionist ways with successor products. It might even be that the most you could make as a successful developer would be having a 'hit app' on the Apple Store.

But, the market conditions will almost certainly generate far more value, in aggregate, for Android developers than iPhone developers; it's going to be a more democratized, far broader market for Android devices really soon now.

If Apple remains tied to AT&T, then Android might very well become the dominant platform by gobbling up marketshare from WinMo, Symbian, and BlackBerry. Android will probably also gain share by moving down-market into "feature phones". As successful as the iPhone is, it's still a miniscule fraction of overall phone sales.

This battle feels hauntingly familiar. Back in the 1980s, Apple made a boatload of money by pushing an elegant, easy-to-use 'sealed box' platform. They eventually got clobbered by cheaper hardware running more open software.

If Apple isn't careful, that's going to play out all over again.

It's not a competition. The iPhone offers things Android does not and can not offer. It will always have a market. Meanwhile, Android is appearing on dozens of phones, none of which individually will rival the iPhone. They both have a spot in the market.

This isn't the same as the PC market was back then. Apple's in a much more dominant position, it's making more money than any of its competitors, it's got the world's most renowned design team, it's the most trusted brand on the planet in key demographics as of 2009. It's got no competition in its particular field, which isn't necessarily that of "phone".

I'm sorry, but you just described Apple in 1985.

Thanks to the Mac and the Apple II, they were making money hand-over-fist. They also had the best designers, and were an incredibly trusted brand with both professionals and the education market. To top it all off, they had a giant technology lead over any of their competitors (except Commodore). The Mac was considered far more than a "computer" at the time.

The IBM PC never matched the Macintosh for sales. However, the combined fleet of clones reached such a high volume that the PC clone market became the primary target for developers. Android has similar potential.

You're probably right that the iPhone will stick around indefinitely. The Macintosh, in a similar position, has increased its total unit sales, year over year, every year since the initial release. However, it would be hard to argue that Apple was competitive during the 1990s for mindshare or developers.

The real risk to Apple is not that they'll crash and burn and go out of business. The risk is that they'll lose their current lead in developer mindshare, and that's a real risk indeed.

*For historical marketshare context, check out http://www.jeremyreimer.com/total_share.html .

Thanks for that link! I'd always thought Apple crashed sales-wise in the 90s. I stand quite corrected.

Hmmm, there are several very significant differences between the two situations though:

- open hardware was critical to the success of the PC platform, allowing functionality such as ethernet, better video, changing disk drive configurations etc. In the mobile phone world, the hardware is locked down for all players.

- computer interface devices (screens, keyboards, mice, touchpads) have all been designed to optimise for ease of use. In the case of mobile phones, the interface devices have been optimised for small size. Concretely this means that both input and output are difficult - writing useable software that runs on two screens with different aspect ratios is a momentous task on a mobile phone, having to allow for the existance or not of a physical keyboard or multitouch screen, same thing. What this means is that a diffuse hardware platform, such as Android is offering, is going to be very difficult to develop high quality apps on. Unless hardware manufacturers can agree on a common platform, this problem is only going to increase. Of course, such a common hardware platform doesn't seem terribly likely to me, as the example of the PC industry shows that this approach quickly reduces manufacturers to commodity providers, with razor thin margins. I suspect that the Samsungs and Motarolas of the world are in no hurry to go there..

- Apple never had the dominance in the computer market that they currently have in the smartphone market - they never got over about 14% of the market with the Mac (although if it continues it's current trajectory, we may see this level beaten in the not too distant future). In the smartphone market however, they are well above this level of marketshare already, and still rising. If you add in iPod Touch sales, the platform is massacring everybody out there.

- At the time when Apple lost market share, home computers were only a small part of the market compared to office computers. Purchasing departments have a strong preference for cheap over quality, provided that a minimum level has been achieved. Consumers are far more discerning. In the mobile world, personal sales are more important than business sales, or to say it another way, you are more likely to have a personal mobile phone than a work phone. All of this acts to reduce one avenue of attack on the iPhone platform - you probably aren't going to be able to win just by doing things cheaper - you're going to have to do things better too.

- phones are far more mission-critical than PCs. If your computer breaks/starts functioning weirdly, you aren't too badly affected. If your phone goes down these days, it's a disaster. There is going to be a premium on reliability, and it remains to be seen as to whether the Android platform can deliver that reliability when there are numerous hardware manufacturers, and a large uncontrolled application base.

There are other differences, but I think these are the important ones. Globally I find these differences big enough that I'm dubious as to the validity of using the PC experience as a guide to the future of the smartphone market.

Just out of interest, what things does the iPhone offer that an Android phone could never do?

The iPhone's got Apple's ridiculous attention to detail. It does small things right that are thoughtful beyond any level of attention Google can afford Android, not just because Google's never been capable of matching Apple in design quality but because Apple, unlike Google, controls their hardware.

What that means is that Apple's allowed to get away with certain things. They can create programs reliant on certain hardware features in the iPhone because they know it'll be there on every phone. They can rely on a high-quality multitouch screen, a certain virtual keyboard set-up that works very well, and a particular screen size that never changes.

What that means is developers don't have to hedge bets. They can go all-out with their designs, knowing that what they see designing is going to be what every iPhone user gets. They can create a design perfectly suited to the iPhone's dimensions and processes, ignoring any possibility that that screen size will be any different or that the phone's functionality will be lacking certain features or a certain high quality. So you have a lot of apps that blow Android applications away, because the developers are so free to be wild.

The one that I think about the most is Weightbot, which has a custom UI that mimics a hard steel door, has a single narrow band that scrolls through days/weight, and which, when rotated, "opens" the door at its seams to reveal what's behind it. That's a design that requires the iPhone, because you'd have to be insane to make a narrow band that requires ultrafluid touch controls on an OS where you don't know how good the touch controls on every phone will be. You couldn't possibly design the app to fit the screen so well, to use the law of thirds like it does to position every control pixel-perfect, to have a major feature rely on tilt-control, or even to have that sliding-out graphic, which takes a knowledge of how it will look on the screen.

You could make an application similar to Weightbot on Android. It wouldn't work as well, it wouldn't look as good, and it would have to compromise its elegance to make sure it worked correctly across all phones. You'd spend a lot more time hunting for bugs. You wouldn't have access to the gorgeous interface design that Apple gives developers out-of-the-box to make apps look iPhone-y. You miss out on a lot of elegance, in other words, because unlike iPhone, Android is not designed to be an elegant product.

I think when discussing Apple's attention to detail it's important to point out that the current iPhones are extremely polished. But remember that it wasn't very long ago that you couldn't cut and paste on an iPhone.

(BTW. I do think the iPhone is more polished that any current release of Android. I'm not sure it matters though. Windows XP is laughably less polished than OSX, but it doesn't seem to be hurting in market share.)

The reason you couldn't cut and paste was that Apple doesn't release a feature until they polished it. They didn't let you make apps until they'd made the App Store, and there was a year of complaining, but when they finally did it they nailed it. Ditto cut and paste, which now works better on the iPhone than it does on anything else.

Monoculture, Apple branding and Apple control. I'm not that these things missing on Android are bad thing, though.