A little clarification before I ramble about Android: I think it’s great that iPhone has serious competition. Android has improved quickly. I know people who love their Droids and we’re still friends. All is good.
But Android and iPhone have different philosophies, and it’s easy to see why. Each entered the market in entirely different circumstances.
Apple made something that didn’t exist before. It was shocking. It sent all the phone companies back to the drawing board. Google entered the phone market as a result of the iPhone revolution. Their challenge wasn’t “How can we build the best phone in the world?” It was “How can we do battle with iPhone?”
Google clearly saw what they were up against: multi-touch interface, beautiful mobile OS and an App Store with a seemingly insurmountable lead. So they acquired Android. They’d acquired Android in 2005. Now they needed to acquire a guiding philosophy. What they chose was a fairly obvious one:
“We’re not iPhone.”
In effect, Android is Google’s “think different.” Don’t want to get stuck with AT&T? We’re everywhere. Apple too strict with app approvals? No approvals here. No Flash on iPhone? We got it. (Almost.) Only one model of iPhone? Androids abound.
Of course, if you’re an Apple fan you can come up with plenty of reasons why Apple’s approach is superior on all counts (well, maybe not the AT&T part). But that’s not the point. This is marketing. This is Google latching onto some negative perceptions and running with them. And it’s working pretty well for them.
One little problem. When “being different” is your guiding philosophy, “being the best” is not. Your decisions can have unintended consequences. Like this one:
Security vendor SMobile Systems just issued a report saying “as many as 20% of applications on the Android Market let third parties access private or sensitive information.” This includes access to content of email and text messages, user location, etc. Google responds that none of this can happen without the user first approving, but then adds: “we will disable any apps that are found to be malicious.”
Well, that’s the problem with being the anti-Apple. You can shun a process for the sake of being different, but the laws of human behavior dictate that malicious apps will inevitably appear. It’s fabulous that Google will disable them after they’re reported — but I doubt that will comfort those who are victimized before Google notices.
If I were Google, I’d worry about what happens when one of those sneaky apps causes widespread damage before it’s plucked out. That’s when people might start to choose iPhone simply because “it’s not Android.”