“Google Inc. is on a mission to make its Android mobile software ubiquitous,” Brian Womack and Mark Milian report for Bloomberg. “In a series of announcements yesterday at its annual developer conference, Google unveiled a new version of the software for handsets and tablets and showed it in use in smartwatches, cars and a new television service..”
“That puts Android, already the world’s top operating system for smartphones, not only into gadgets that people carry with them wherever they go, but also increasingly into their living rooms, onto their bodies and in how they transport themselves,” Womack and Miian report. “Google wants to provide a ‘seamless experience across all these connected devices,’ Android chief Sundar Pichai said at yesterday’s event in San Francisco. ‘We’re making everything contextually aware. We want to know when you’re at home, with your kids.'”
“Earlier this month, Apple showed how its iOS software for the iPad and iPhone and its Mac operating system are increasingly working together, with a customer able to answer a call to an iPhone on his or her iMac. Apple is also looking to get into smartwatches to broaden its product ecosystem,” Womack and Milian report. “‘With Apple already in the TV and car space and rumored to be attacking wearables, Google doesn’t want developers to have any excuse to choose Apple’s ecosystem over Android,’ Carl Howe, an analyst with the Yankee Group, wrote in an e-mail. ‘Therefore, Google wants to ensure that it is in all those places too.’ Yet Google’s strategy of putting Android everywhere is risky, Howe said. A race for ubiquity doesn’t mean Google will necessarily create the best products in each category, he said. Given that Google makes no revenue from the software, ‘it could easily lose money by winning,’ he added.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Google is certainly tone deaf when it comes to privacy. Many will avoid their products because of it. Google is a data vampire. For personal data, especially. Trust us, Google will never know when we’re at home, with our kids.
Google’s OS for everything will result in an inferior experience, with security issues, compatibility issues, fragmentation issues that Apple product users simply will not have to suffer. Google will end up with the world’s most ubiquitous OS. Apple will continue to own the valuable customers – those with money, the proven will to spend it, and the smarts to own the seamless, superior, and safer solutions. The users for whom developers write their best stuff.
Ask Microsoft how this race turns out.
Related articles:
Why Apple really values your privacy – unlike Google, Facebook, or Amazon – June 25, 2014
Android users poorer, shorter, unhealthier, less educated, far less charitable than Apple iPhone users – November 13, 2013
F-Secure: Android accounted for 99% of new mobile malware in Q1 2014 – April 30, 2014
Google’s Sundar Pichai: Android not designed to be safe; if I wrote malware, I’d target Android, too – February 27, 2014