Now don’t get me wrong, this is not a religious war, a gripe about iOS 4 or the iPhone 4′s relative ability to sustain a phone call. Earlier this year I gave up my iPhone 3G and started using the Google Nexus One. Why? I’d had an iPhone for over 18 months and could upgrade (relatively) cheaply to the iPhone 4 if I’d wanted to.
Initially the Nexus One was intended for use strictly as a platform to write some mobile applications. However to develop good applications you need to appreciate how people interact with the phone’s user interface, so I opened a Gmail account (required anyway to activate the phone) and set my OS X address book to synchronise with it – after first removing all sensitive information from the entries.
After a couple of weeks of using both phones and switching my SIM card between the two of them however, I knew that I was going to stop using my iPhone altogether. The iPhone hadn’t stopped being a bad phone, but I found the Android user experience better. With iOS there is a lot of drilling down through lists to get to a particular feature or setting in an application, but in Android the ‘long press’ acts as a right-click and brings up a context menu. In addition the menu button at the bottom of the screen also allows quick access to other activities in context. The overall effect is that I can navigate quicker and more efficiently around and between applications.
There are other nice features too. Home screen widgets is a concept that iOS has yet to embrace and the way applications work when they are not active is also well thought through. Not full multi-tasking, but the same end result from the user’s point of view.
Moving on from the operating system there are two other key points that in my view gives Android a decided advantage over iOS: the openness of the platform, and competition.
Apple’s iOS is not an open platform. There is a small group of iPhone applications I have which are no longer available, around WiFi mainly, which Apple approved and then some time later removed. Apple dictates what can and cannot be sold through its application store and whilst some of its aims are laudable, others are simply self-serving or easily circumvented. Google on the other hand exercises no arbitrary censorship on applications in its store, instead requiring developers to ensure merely that they stay within the law in the contries the application is made available in. Android is fundamentally an open platform and does not try to control what people can and cannot do – either as users or developers.
iOS is also a single supplier system. You buy from Apple or its resellers, at Apple’s price, or you don’t get an iPhone. Android is on phones from over a dozen manufacturers though, and they all compete – on features and on price. So when I go into my local Vodafone store (for example) I can get an iPhone 4 for £120 on a £35 per month package, or I can get a Nexus One for free with the same package (minutes, text and data) for only £30 a month – over a two year contract a saving of £240.
Competition is healthy for businesses, good for the consumer, and stokes the flames of innovation. Competition just saved me £240.