Android Has Never Saved Christmas
Why remarkable Android devices haven’t convinced high-end consumers to switch
[Disclaimer: I work for Unity Technologies. The below thoughts are my own and not my company’s. Also, I love both Android and iOS. I rock a Nexus 7 (2nd Edition) regularly switch my sim card between an iPhone 5 and various Android handsets.]
I love Android. I’ve shown off several devices to colleagues and friends and talked lovingly of the ecosystem. I’ve encouraged members of my team @UnityGames to go Android for a while. (And they all liked it.) But why did I have to needle people? Why did Facebook need office signage and a help desk to encourage people to switch? Why, if Android is objectively better, haven’t iPhone users switched en masse? I posit some reasons below.
(Dalvik + Quad Core CPU + 2GB RAM) < (iPhone + Dual Core CPU + 1GB RAM)
Specs don’t matter. There, I said it. Why? Say what you will about how quickly JIT compiling from the JVM works on Android. But the fact remains that it’s not as responsive as advertised. I know this because every iPhone user notices the stuttered scrolling on Android. And maybe it’s not only the JIT compiler. Maybe it’s Android’s garbage collection using extra clock cycles, causing a small but noticeable loss in performance. Maybe iPhones just have better touch screens. Whatever it is, people perceive it and they don’t like it. Hence, the quad core CPUs sported by most Android phones actually deliver worse performance than the dual core chips on iPhone, mainly because Java doesn’t compile to assembly code on Android, whereas Objective-C does for iOS.
I’m not going to weigh in on the conversation regarding garbage collection vs. ARC, because it’s not relevant to this point. In fact, as Paul Stamatiou eloquently details, no matter how you feel about performance, the permissions available on Android make it a far superior developer environment. Furthermore, riding the yearly efficiency boost in power consumption, OEM’s will pack faster chips and more RAM into phones. Essentially, very soon brute force computing will make this a non-issue. Still, for the time being, and for the past 5 years, Android has felt stuttered, addled, and ever-so-slightly non-responsive. That matters to consumers. (What also matters to consumers is that heavy CPUs necessitate larger batteries, and thus Androids take noticeably longer to charge. People don’t like that either.)
Customizability < “It Just Works”
A quick perusal of Google Play’s top paid apps reveals that Android users love to customize their devices. For example, a top 5 paid app is Titanium Backup PRO Key ★ root, which avails the user such mystifying features as “Hypershell speed” and “Bloatware Melter” (which sounds promising but is apparently still “experimental”).
Listen, I love that HD Widgets lets me do things like control the screen’s orientation or brightness with shortcuts. But try explaining why this is awesome to an iPad user, where shortcuts to these functions are already built into the OS. That’s the crux of the issue. Android sports a deeper feature suite than iOS, but sans customization, only like 80% of it is readily exposed to the user. Let me put it another way. What Android users see as a strength, iOS users see as an annoyance. Apple wins on usability exactly because their OS is already “pre-customized”.
$649 GS4 + No contract < $199 iPhone 5 + Contract
The Google Play edition of the Samsung Galaxy S4 rings in at a cool $649. Sure, it’s contract free, but this doesn’t matter in the USA, “where AT&T, Verizon and Sprint won’t bill you less if you bring your own phone.” An iPhone 5 (with contract) with the same 16GB of storage (the only spec that matters), rings in at $199.
Why does this matter? Bloatware. You can’t get a subsidized phone in the USA without what most people call carrier bloatware. (Titanium Backup PRO Key ★ root and it’s experimental Bloatware Melter to the rescue!) Don’t get me wrong. I think HTC’s BlinkFeed™ is gorgeous. I also think their vertical scrolling of apps makes more sense on a handset, where vertical scrolling is the paradigm. But as the top Android apps indicate, users want customizability, not extra features that interfere with their perfect setup. The fact that, save flashing, you can’t get a vanilla Android experience on a handset for <$600 is a real problem.
It’s the killer apps, stupid (and the camera)
I spent a month with my sim card inside a Nexus 4, and I loved it. It made me fall in love with Android. The seamless integration of services made me shake my fist at all those times I clicked on a calendar invite in my iPhone’s email and was bounced to an error web page. I spent another month with an HTC One (Google Play edition). What an amazing device! The best screen I’ve ever seen on a phone. The best speakers I’ve ever heard on a phone. But I went back to my iPhone 5. Why? Two killer apps: iMessage and the camera.
It strikes me as salient that both MG Siegler and Paul Stamatiou both mention missing iMessage. I missed it too, mainly because the default messaging in vanilla Android is DOA, and I could never find anything that measured up to iMessage’s simplicity and grace. Additionally, messaging apps appear to be heavily influenced by what your social group is using. While other users may be knee deep in Whatsapp or Snapchat, my network uses iMessage, so I want to as well.
Regarding the camera, let me quote Paul: “I can’t tap on a dark part of the photo and have the levels adjust accordingly to prevent washed out areas (something I could do on the iPhone 5).” That was my exact experience as well. The HTC One, while remarkable in low light, doesn’t have the clarity or range of the iPhone’s camera. Great photos lured me back to the iPhone. Like iMessage, it’s a killer app. Other iPhone users have their killer apps too, like “Reader” for Safari. Siri has this potential as well. For example, it’s how I open apps, rather that visually hunting them down or searching for them in Spotlight.
As Janie Porche would say, until Android sports an app, service, or feature that “saves Christmas,” we won’t see mass adoption from high-end consumers. (Though @ashbash is quick to point out that Swiftkey is a killer app exclusive to Android, a true differentiator. That, and larger screens.)
BYOD and Fragmentation
The problem isn’t that startups don’t care about Android. The problem is that employees bring their own devices to work. And most of them, in Silicon Valley at least where consumerization of the enterprise is being incubated, have iPhones. That’s why developers are building iPhone first, because that’s what their customers are using. Technology is now adopted from the bottom up, from consumer to business, a complete one-eighty from thirty years ago. The consumer install base has massive influence over the priorities of enterprise SaaS. And those priorities are iOS-first right now. (Once Javascript is handled at reasonable speeds on mobile, I imagine universal HTML5 apps will dominate. But we’re probably >2 years from that.)
Finally, since I work with game developers, I have to mention the fragmentation on Android. It’s well documented how thousands of devices have fragmented Android — at the component level, at the OS version level, even at the app store level — creating friction for developers. But even Google’s gorgeous Nexus line of devices are fragmented. How? The Nexus 10 sports a different GPU (the powerful ARM Mali-T604) than the Nexus 7 and Nexus 4 (Qualcomm’s amazing Adreno 320). Additionally, last year’s Nexus 7 contains yet another GPU, Nvidia’s trusty Tegra 3. Developers have to optimize for three different GPUs just for the Nexus line. That’s fragmentation, that’s friction, and that’s a wrap. Thanks for reading.
