Google, Apple and the Battle for Mobile

I recently came across this excellent article by Derek Brown. It helped reaffirm my own thoughts on what I believe is happening in the mobile industry. I agree with Derek’s assertion that hardware and core OS functionality have largely reached a near-term point of peak innovation and the focus has now shifted to web or cloud services. This change in focus will certainly have interesting consequences in the battle for mobile supremacy.

Historically, the complaint against Android has been that of fragmentation. Mobile app developers generally have complained about the pain involved in testing their apps across a plethora of Android devices in the market. However, we are now increasingly seeing more standardization among Android devices. Case in point, this latest report states that Android development has improved drastically as developers now only have to test among a quarter of the number of devices than what it was a year ago due to increasing standardization in the Android handset industry. Apart from this trend in hardware standardization, we are also witnessing mobile and app UI design move towards standardization. It is reported that with iOS 7, Apple will be moving away from their skeuomorphic design and will be using the same flat UI design approach currently prevalent in Android and Windows Phone devices. So without significant differences in hardware and UI design, the next battle among mobile OS ecosystems would be in delivering best service experiences for consumers. By retaining control over both hardware and software, Apple theoretically should be in the best position to deliver this. We saw Apple’s attempt this with the release of Siri. However, as was widely reported, Apple’s attempt only received a lukewarm response. Google with its Google Now service now has a better answer to Siri. If Siri could help you with looking up stuff, Google Now instead goes a step ahead and tells you about the stuff that you should look at.

It is clear that as devices are becoming standardized and even commoditized, it would be the services that would differentiate one ecosystem from the other and ultimately determine the winner in this battle. It is important to note that it is easy to innovate in services than in hardware. One reason is because services lend themselves to be easily iterated on. For example, Google could build a minimum viable version of a new web service in a few months, deliver it to the market, get user feedback and iterate. This iterative approach apart from being less costly, minimizes the time to market and also improves the chance of success. Hardware by its very nature doens’t allow for an iterative approach. Apple refreshes their hardware only once every year. They feel the pressure to get it absolutely right each time they release a device to the market. They do have some room for error as they have built an enormous brand cache that they could leverage for a while. However, they still can’t experiment with radically different concepts. This is one reason we are only seeing minimal changes (increases in screen size?) to the iPhone design over the past few years. It is a huge risk for them to try something radically different given their once a year refresh cycle. Apple knows this very well and hence they feel the pressure to innovate in software services. We saw them attempt this by releasing Siri while it was in beta. But the problem for them is that people are not used to consuming beta services from Apple. When people buy a device or use a service from Apple, they expect it to work perfectly (“It just works!” is Apple’s sales pitch). Apple also has no previous expertise in delivering or managing beta services. Apple’s recent foray into building their own Maps service was also a failure. Compared to Apple, Google instead has built all its successes until now by delivering exceptional web services. By making Android open, Google is allowing its hardware partners to compete among themselves and innovate quickly rather than tied by constraints of annual refresh cycles. This has resulted in a wide variety of Android devices in the market, providing customers excellent alternatives to choose from based on their specific needs. Also, aside from working with external hardware partners to deliver the Nexus line of reference devices, Google itself is also experimenting with new hardware concepts. Google is currently well ahead of the competition as we see them invest in radically new hardware ideas such as the Google Glass. It is also refreshing to see Google pursue an iterative development approach with Google Glass. Unlike Apple’s secretive approach to product design and development, Google is willing to release their Glass hardware to developers early, encouraging them to hack and identify interesting use cases and thereby minimizing chances of failure at launch. I’m personally excited about Google Glass as I believe that it will have a similar transformative effect on personal computing as smartphones had when they first burst into the scene. Again, Google has the ability to make Glass a success with their expertise in delivering services that can make best use of the Google Glass hardware. Many of the popular services that people consume (Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Calendar) are already from Google.

The winners in this battle for mobile would ultimately be the ones who manage to deliver outstanding user experience not just through exceptional hardware design but through an excellent combination of both hardware and software services. In the end, we, the consumers, will be the ones who would benefit from this rivalry. We should all prepare to be delighted.