Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about porting Vegas Mate, one of my iPhone apps, to other platforms, specifically Android. I see a future where Google and Apple both have significant market-share and thus if the goal is to make mobile apps a real livelihood, it’d be a good idea to be on both platforms. I’m a curious fellow so it could also be fun to compare and contrast the different platforms to see how they solve similar problems differently.
On the Android side, there are basically two top devices at the moment – Motorola’s Droid on Verizon’s CDMA network and the unlocked Google/HTC GSM-based Nexus One, also available on T-Mobile with subsidy.
This post has nothing to do about network reliability or performance – there are many people far more qualified than I that have done exhaustive tests on that front. Everyone knows that AT&T on the iPhone is pretty bad in some cities (though fortunately not here in Santa Barbara).
This post is also not meant to be a thorough review. For the Nexus, I’d recommend skimming this Engadget review if you’re curious about all the ins and outs.
After looking closely at both the Droid and the Nexus One (N1), I decided to purchase the latter, for the following reasons:
1. The N1 runs Android 2.1, slightly newer than the 2.0 version running on Droid and while they say an upgrade will come, it hasn’t yet.
2. I was able to get the N1 unlocked and without a contract, meaning I could easily use it as a ‘test’ phone on AT&T without having to sign up for another provider’s service.
3. The Droid has a hardware keyboard but compared to a BlackBerry it really sucks. I’m used to software keyboards via the iPhone so the form-factor of the N1 was more appealing.
I ended up using Android for a few days to try to get a feel for the OS and see if the hype around the phone was justified.
To summarize – in it’s current form Android is not bad but not great. It has come a long way in 18 months but still is not as polished as the iPhone experience. Others have said this and I think it’s very apt – using an Android phone feels a lot like running Linux on the desktop – it works but something feels missing. You really get the sense it was ‘designed’ by engineers, not real designers. Android seems like a collection of technologies, not a finished, polished product designed with a single vision.
Both of these pieces do a good job of describing that feeling and I’d recommend reading both:
• Boy Genius Thoughts on Android
• Daggle.com
I did run into glitches and annoyances:
• Animations can be jerky.
• Application UI varies enough between the apps that you don’t instantly just know how things work.
• The lack of pinch-and-zoom, a common interaction technique on the iPhone, seems like a major omission in day-to-day use.
• I really miss the iPhone’s hardware based ’silent’ switch for turning off the ringer in one move.
• The soft buttons below the screen only work about 75% of the time – otherwise they do nothing.
• I never realized how much I missed short-cuts like being able to tap at the top of an iPhone table to get all the way back to the top.
• The iPhone assigns ‘gravity’ to scrolling to give it a more natural feel. That’s missing here.
Some stuff about Android is really cool: I loved the Google Goggles app. Very neat, even if it’s basically a tech demo at this point. The N1 itself is a very nice piece of hardware – well built device that feels very solid in your hand.
The open nature of the system is both a strength and a weakness. You can replace core components with new software – Google Voice can replace the dialer for example – that’s very cool. Still, this brings me back to the Linux analogy – the system is infinitely configurable and interchangeable but sometimes I want less choice – an expert to define a great experience and hand it over to me to use.
As an iPhone developer, I’m as sick of the App Store BS as anyone. Still, a recent experience with my mom made me see things a bit differently. She recently moved to the iPhone and to her, a single store run by Apple is a reassuring thing, not a negative. After many years as a customer, she trusts Apple and likes the system they’ve built with iTunes and the App Store.
The Google Marketplace is not all that impressive – difficult to find applications and while some are pretty good, I didn’t find any that struck me to be of the same quality as the very best iPhone apps (there are tons of crap apps on iPhone as well). A technical issue with Android significantly limits the amount of apps you can store on the device though this is supposed to change with a future software update.
Some users are reporting issues with the N1 cell radio performance. The sticky part of the issue is that they can’t get anyone to take responsibility – it seems Google has a thing or two to learn about customer support for direct consumer purchases. Waiting two days for an email from the support guy doesn’t work if your phone is busted.
Bottom line – I’m staying on iPhone, at least for now. I’ll keep watching Android and I’m still seriously considering porting an app, if only to see how hard it would be to do so.
For someone that’s buying now and not sure what to do, it’s important to keep in mind that the iPhone 3GS is probably half-way through it’s lifecycle – most people expect new hardware in June. Apple (unlike Google w/ Android who have splintered their platform a bit with multiple versions and no unified upgrade) are very good about providing the latest software for all their phones – even the original iPhone can run the latest 3.1 software. Still, new hardware will likely include cool new features and it would be a shame to miss that by a few months with a purchase today.
Also, the January 27th event that will supposedly bring an Apple tablet may also bring news of iPhone OS 4.0 – critical data for someone deciding between the two mobile OSes.
Like many others, I think it’s great to see Apple get some serious competition with their smartphone – that’s the only thing that will push them to ‘do the right thing’ when it comes to the App Store, the OS and the platform in general.