Back to iPhone (Part 1)

The’s a well-known quote which states that it takes a brave man to admit he’s wrong.

April last year, I wrote of what I saw as Apple’s hypocrisy and egoistic practices and how I hoped someone would challenge them to make them more aware of this and hopefully drive them away from the worst of these.

In order to support this ideal, I bought an Android phone and embraced the Google ecosystem, thinking that the “open” and “collaborative” atmosphere I thought existed would be a great change after the “closed” and “secretive” atmosphere of Apple.

It turns out, I was wrong. While some of what I wrote before I still believe is true, it turns out that the some of the alternatives are as bad if not worse. I recently bit the bullet and bought an iPhone 4S and the great experiment is, if not over, at least suspended for a time.

In the next couple of posts, I’m going to outline some of the reasons why I went away from Android. Let’s start with a look at the “philosophy” of the platforms:

User Experience Philosophy

If you know how to use one iPhone, you can pick up any other iPhone and use it; you can navigate, launch applications, make phone calls just like you can on your own phone. Just as important to the experience is that applications have a consistent look and feel to them and things tend to look and work the same way in any application you run. This is a good thing, nobody likes a moving target. The iPhone resolution is consistent (iPhone 4 resolution is exactly double of the older phones) so things look the same on an old iPhone and a new iPhone.

This is in stark contrast to Android where even before you install any applications of your own you are dealing with things like Motorola’s (horrible) MOTOBLUR or HTC’s Sense which change, sometimes quite radically, the default experience. In addition, Android phone vendors tend to install their own replacement default applications (Samsung’s Music application is actually worse than the default Android music application shipped with Gingerbread).  Applications on Android do their own thing and behave in inconsistent ways. In addition, Android was build for a range of resolutions and aspect ratios and some application are just unusable unless you have the right combination of these.

Hardware Philosophy

It’s safe to say that the iterations of the iPhone hardware are conservative, but I think this is a good thing. To take a counter example, let’s look at the launch of the Motorola RAZR Android phone. For a brief second, it was the headline Android device when it launched on November 11, 2011. Six days later, not even a week, it was trumped by the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (which introduced yet another new resolution and yet another different aspect ratio).

In contrast to this, there’s the iPhone which comes out once a year, regular as clockwork, so you don’t need to play guessing games as to whether to buy a certain model at a certain time. Also, although unstated, there seems to be a philosophy of a complete redesign every couple of years and a refinement of the model in the middle. There is a confidence that their hardware design will still be relevant a year later; when was the last time you saw an advert for a 12-month-old phone in media – the only example I can think of is the iPhone.

Software philosophy

While the claims of “fragmentation” of the Android platform may be overblown, there is certainly a different philosophy when it comes to firmware updates. I like the fact that Apple encourages everyone to run the latest operating system with the associated fixes. This stops people from becoming frustrated when there is a bug in the OS and you cannot update to a firmware revision where the problem is fixed (without jailbreaking and custom firmware). I believe this moves the platform forward as a whole quicker that otherwise would happen; features can be added for everyone to use, and for developers, APIs can be deprecated quicker and new APIs introduced.

Android as an OS is frustrating. In some cases, core functionality of the Android platform is broken and there have been some quite nasty bugs that are still in Android – the media stack especially is problematic for me personally. I want something that works, and my definition of works means that I do not spend several hours working around things just to play a song with metadata and cover-art without crashing my entire phone. It makes the OS feel like it has 100 half-finished features instead of 50 finished features. I prefer the latter.

Android true believers will tell you that you can “root” the device and install any firmware you want, and there are heaps of custom firmware images around that fix these problems, but how much do you trust some anonymous person on the internet to bake a firmware image is not a trojan, or does not have a back-door or security hole in it?

The “openness” of the Android platform is largely an illusion from what I see; development happens internally and is pushed out to people, but there seems to be little ability to get external changes wrapped back into the core platform (which others have complained about), and there is almost no good information about how to develop and debug at the lower levels of the OS if you do. Still more concerning, there is no governance model to encourage (or require) people to contribute to the core platform, and no requirement for vendors to stick to the core source, so the traffic appears to be largely one-way. You cannot help but feel that this allows Google to control the platform in a way that belies its “open” tag.

That’s enough for now. Next time I’ll delve into Look and Feel more, Syncing, the App Store, and the Development experience.

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