On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 2:02 PM, Michael Hawksworth <[email protected]>wrote:
> . It is obviously far easier to develop something for a few dozen hardware > combinations than it is to deliver to thousands. > I read a fascinating article (which I can't find any longer) talking about the design philosophy differences between iOS and Android. Android was written by engineers, it argued, where the primary concern is connectivity. You want to use THIS or THAT? Sure, you can use all that stuff with Android. You can connect services nobody even thought of yet. It might be clunky to set up, but you can make anything work -- the driving force is flexibility and capability, from the developer's standpoint. The iPhone and related devices, however, have a different strategy -- it's all about user experience. Make it simple, make it consistent, make it work. You may not be able to connect to a non-Apple device or that cool new service somebody just started, but that doesn't matter because the Apple devices you CAN connect to will just work flawlessly and consistently. Both sides have benefits and drawbacks -- and by and large, they're polar opposites of each other. I can't afford an iAnything, but our household has two Android phones (prepaid devices from Virgin Mobile) -- we pay less for our unlimited data and less for our phones combined than ONE iPhone would cost us in monthly and up-front costs. Much of that flexibilty comes from the fact that our Android phones, while they do everything we want, are low-end smartphones -- making compromises for cost that Apple would never tolerate. But personally I'm okay with that -- "good enough" is flippin' awesome! The advantage of the fragmented model is exactly that type of flexibilty -- you can buy a Cadillac Android, or you can buy an economy Android, or anything in between (same is true for Windows PCs). You have flexibility in the software you run. You can flexibility in the app stores you use. Anything is possible -- you just may have to figure it out yourself. The choices are almost overwhelming -- which ends up being a challenge for developers as well, since their app might be running on low-end or high-end gear. The advantage of Apple's model is simplicity and reliability. In some cases that simplicity means fewer choices -- which, if you're overwhelmed by the 100s of Android phones available, can be a good thing. The disadvantage is much the same -- there's no such thing as an economy iPhone, just a choice of last year's used Cadillac. Neither approach is right or wrong -- they're opposite ends of a spectrum (and in truth, neither Windows nor Mac, and neither Android nor iOS, sit entirely at one end of that spectrum without budging -- all of them have at least some pull towards the middle in some manner). And that's about as deep as I want to get into OS wars. Call me selfish...but that's a different thread.
