Gruber reports, “All three found Android significantly lacking.”
“No doubt some iPhone owners look upon this with glee, much like sports fans watching a rival team flail. I look upon it with glum disappointment. I’ve said it before and will say it again, the best thing that could happen for Apple and iPhone owners would be for at least one strong rival to appear. Two would be even better. A monoculture benefits no one in the long run, because it’s competition that drives innovation,” Gruber opines.
MacDailyNews Take: Gee, then how did Apple produce the iPhone (or the Mac, the iPod, or Mac OS X, for that matter) in the first place? Apple competes very effectively with themselves. History proves that they certainly do not need a bunch of wannabes to spur them on.
Gruber writes, “I know there are new Android phones on the horizon. I know there have been some nice Android OS updates. But from my vantage point, the Android state-of-the-art is today further behind the iPhone state-of-the-art than it was when the G1 debuted last October.”
Gruber offers up some suggestions for how Google Android phone-makers can try to out iPhone Apple’s iPhone in his full article here.
Or – you could work for Microsofty.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/08/17/microsoft-app-marketplace-the-cartoon/
That article was lame, I was reading in hopes of it telling why they decided not to write for the Android phones, when in the end it turned out to be an article about how to topple the iPhone’s dominance 🙁
Man, I am sooooooo sick of that oft repeated line about how Apple needs competition, blah blah blah. MDN is spot on – Apple came up with the iPhone, and then two more iterations in the absence of any meaningful competition. Time for bloggerists to do a bit more of their own thinking and stop repeating exhausted lines. Indeed, it strikes me that in the business world, there is little competition, ever – there is instead a single company that makes a break through, and the others then copy it. A bit depressing, really.
I have Android and love it. I had an iPhone and had one too many issues… light leaks, dust under the LCD, Wifi issues… I have no regrets trading mine and all the apps are free on the Android with less Ads. iPhone free apps = garbage
@ Peter,
Put it back in your pants dude.
@Peter,
well good for you…
we all have reasons…
i can’t stand AT&T;.
But i still see way more useful apps on iPhone than Android (at this time)
Regarding free apps being junk… well, isnt that what we should expect? Windows had a ton of useless apps… because they were free or a developer was just plain bored. I know someone who created a piano with cat sounds. Useless? sure, jokes besides, but really how many quality free stuff should we expect?
i will say that Android will likely be the only challenger. but until they unify the platform a bit. The iPhone will continue to dominate. If Apple decides to drop the dumb exclusive thing with AT&T;- sorry but i am unsure if Apple will have a true competitor in that space. A legal monopoly like Windows would exist.
Gruber is almost always a good read. He is a constructively critical fan, that may rub some Apple fanboys the wrong way.
Just because there are no phones that come close to the iPhone does not mean there is no competition. Of coarse there is competition and Apple knows it. Apple knows that if they slack off, a better product will emerge.
Apple is the kind of company that isn’t slacking. Someday, it may go the route of M$. But for now, every one knows Apple is a special company because they are competitive and know that competition is right behind them.
Thank goodness for competition, it gives us great Apple products.
The problem with Android is exactly what most people tout as “a good thing.” Android runs on may different phones from many different manufacturers.
From a developer’s perspective, that is a nightmare. They have to account for different processors, different hardware specifications, different user input methods, different screen sizes, and different wireless network standards. In the mobile phone world, such diversity is much more severe than in the PC world. Imagine a lone developer having to test his or her app against all of those variations in what an “Android phone” can be. It would be impossible.
If they develop for iPhone, one version of their app works on all the millions of iPhones and iPod touches ever sold. Even if a future versions of iPhone (or that “tablet”) is significantly different, Apple is one company. They will keep control of the change so that old apps still work and developers can make a smooth transition to the new hardware capabilities while maintaining reasonable compatibility with older hardware.
This is about the 10th time that I’ve wondered why anyone reads John Gruber.
I think he’s a bit clueless.
All anyone can hope for is to follow Apple. Apple is setting the pace and the direction for the iPhone. If you want to innovate then you need to move in a direction away from the iPhone and innovate. Because you’ll never out iPhone the inventor of the iPhone.
The mistake that Microsoft has made with the Zune thing they have. The mistake take all the iPhone copycat makers are making. The Pre is not innovation, nor was HTC’s G1 phone… RIMM could compete if they forgot what Apple was doing and did their own Blackberry thing, Nokia could compete doing their own Nokia thing. The problem isn’t that the iPhone does not have competitors it just does not have any competitors that are innovating, all the competitors are coping the iPhone or the other iPhone copiers. Even Dell is coping Apple’s iPhone.
“Yeah, I hate the iPhone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hate ATT.” Yeah, yeah, yeah ad infinitum.
Do you guys not get it? People’s self worth today is determined primarily by how much they loathe the products and services surrounding them. “Me? Easily satisfied? Not on your life! Nothing is good enough for me! There’s something wrong with EVERYTHING!
The iPhone’s imperfect. ATT sucks. Verizon is hogwash. Sprint is bogus. The Pre? HAH!
How I do miss the good old days when fools’ names, fools’ faces, and fools’ OPINIONS were found only in private places, not public. Including mine.
Anything from the troll Peter (not the properly logged in Peter) carries about about the same value as ZuneTang.
Competition drove innovation in the days of the cotton gin, and steam powered engines, but not any more. Apple has proven that there’s not much competition or innovation from big companies and ‘competition is good’ is wishful yet outdated thinking. The public is the problem. They are happy with whatever they get, so 95% of all companies don’t need to try any harder. It’s simple, Apple’s innovations makes companies WANT to finally compete, yet then they lack the actual innovation TO compete. Every iphone competitor competes on iphones terms = total lack of innovation = basically counterfeiting. People still buy these iphone knockoffs though, so they kkep being made under the guise of ‘competition’ and ‘innovation’. I didn’t need anyone to tell me Android was a miss, so why are people fooling themselves? Google makes 98% of its revenue from search, and haven’t shown any innovation in anything that isn’t free. Of course people will think highly of you when you give away things for free – but your accountant won’t appreciate it.
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If you want to understand where Google would like to see mobile computing go, just visit one of the many “free” web sites on which you cannot differentiate the content from the advertisements. Google gets money from the advertising and, it i my opinion that they would be just as happy if only advertising appeared on the net.
@Macaday
Gruber is the antithesis of “a bit clueless”.
@Macaday
This is about the 10th time that I’ve wondered why anyone reads John Gruber.
Because he’s almost always right.
Ya know, a beneficent monoculture actually benefits everyone.
@Macaday
For someone who presumably doesn’t read Gruber I’m impressed you can have an opinion.
Nothing like confusing Capitalism, Consumer Focus and Competition.
Apple’s products are successful due to their consumer-centric focus. They are all about “Fit and Finish.” They can do all of this because we, the consumers, and Apple, the company, enjoy the benefits of capitalism. Capitalism encourages and rewards innovation and quality. The consumers get good products and the company gets our cash. Competition encourages fair pricing of goods and services based on supply and demand but sometimes leads to pricing wars which can result in really cheap goods but also usually results in a loss of quality. A company doesn’t need “Competition” to release a successful product. They need to focus on the customer and release a product that offers some advantage over the status quo.
iPhone had to catch up to Android with copy/paste, MMS, video recording, landscape keyboard, etc. Perhaps, someday in the distant future, the iPhone will catch up with calling technology such as Google Voice. The reason those developers couldn’t leave Apple is clear: they are addicted to Apple just like every other drooling iPhone owner and they couldn’t handle the diversity, freedom and richness of Android. They were lost without their master Apple telling them what they can and can’t do on their single platform. Anyway, you can take some satisfaction that the iPhone is packaged in such a stylish box.
“A monoculture benefits no one in the long run, because it’s competition that drives innovation,” Gruber opines.
This “competition drives innovation” bullsh*t is an empty myth. As MDN suggests, Apple could never have come up with the iMac, the iPod or the iPhone if they had needed industry competition to push them forward because there wasn’t any.
I agree that it would be interesting if a serious challenger or two stepped up to the plate; but meanwhile, Apple is doing very well without them, thank you very much.
OK, I read the whole linked article. John Gruber’s “advice” to non-Apple smart phone makers may be fine and reasonable. But there is one MINOR problem.
If Apple’s competition actually had the combined software and hardware expertise (as well as the attention-to-detail and internal discipline) to do what Apple did with the original iPhone, they would have done so already. Google is essentially outsourcing Android hardware. And most of the smart phone makers are outsourcing the software, to Google or maybe even Microsoft. Gruber can “advise” them to make the “Porsche” of smart phones all he wants, but it is not technically possible (at least not now) for any company (except Apple) to create a super-duper smart phone that can top iPhone. The first phone that will top the current iPhone 3GS will be next year’s iPhone model, and that will further widen the gap with competing phones.
As Gruber said himself, the gap between Android phones and the iPhone is wider today than it was when the first Android phone (the G1) was released about one year ago. The reason the competing mobile phones are barely adequate (compared to iPhone) is because that’s the best they can do at the moment. Unlike Apple, who won’t release a product until it’s near perfect, the competition ships their products when they reach the “barely adequate” stage of development.
I personally prefer reading Daniel Eran Dilger of Roughly Drafted.
Gruber does make sense a lot of the time, but I definitely don’t think he’s as detailed as Dilger. Dilger offers some extraordinary insights into the world of Apple and its competitors, he has no equal in this regard.
@razor
Funny, I’ve always felt the opposite … Roughly Drafted is a fun read, but I’ve always felt that Gruber went a bit deeper and not just said the obvious things. But maybe that’s just me
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