Struggling to keep up with Apple, Google’s Android faces a hard slog ahead
“At Google I/O, the group’s annual technology showcase event,” Richard Waters and Tim Bradshaw report for The Financial Times, “Sameer Iyengar, a former Google employee who is now a co-founder of app maker Beautylish, questioned whether Google was being bold enough in laying out its tech vision: ‘The thought leadership is maybe absent, compared to where it was in the past.'”
“There is a hard slog ahead. With a disparate group of handset makers in the Android camp, the platform has struggled to match the more polished set of services and hardware that Apple has built around the iPhone, such as Apple Pay and, more recently, Watch,” Waters and Bradshaw report. “Last week, matching — and trying to surpass — Apple was a strong subtext of Google’s pitch to developers. New features included Android Pay, a rival to Apple Pay and a fresh attempt to break into mobile payments after the disappointment of Google Wallet. A new Google Photos app — with the promise of software that can automatically organise libraries of pictures — also echoed capabilities that are already offered by Apple.”
“But in other areas, Google seemed unprepared. While smartwatches based on last year’s Android Wear technology have been put in the shade by the launch of Apple Watch, Google had little new to show off in response. This was a sign that it is surrendering early leadership in wearables to Apple, according to Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Kantar Worldpanel,” Waters and Bradshaw report. “Yet some of the latest attempts to extend the Android universe clearly play to Google’s strengths. Its new photos app offers free storage for an unlimited number of pictures… Sucking in large volumes of photos also presents a new opportunity for Google to add to its already substantial mass of data about users. Company executives say they have not made plans to scan the pictures for advertising purposes but make no secret of the fact that a person’s photo library comprises a highly valuable source of information about them.”
