“Apple’s iPhone remains the handset to beat in an ever more-crowded smartphone marketplace,” Erik Kain writes for Forbes. “Even without the newest iPhone[s] on the horizon [which they are], Apple is still beating the Android competition in several crucial ways. I say this as someone who owns a Galaxy S6; who owned a Galaxy Note 3 before that.”
1. Bloatware: If you purchase an Android smartphone from just about any of the major manufacturers—from LG to Sony to Samsung and more — you will discover a terrible and inescapable fact: Your phone is filled with pre-installed bloatware (software that you neither want nor need) that you have no way of uninstalling.
2. The App Store:Unlike the well-organized, nicely curated App Store you find when perusing on your iPhone or iPad, Google Play is a mess. Even after all these years, and some mild improvements, Google Play remains an ugly, poorly organized store filled with myriad knock-offs and dubious “games” and other apps of questionable quality and trustworthiness.
3. The best apps are still on iOS, at least at first: Android’s own diversity—a selling point—also means splintering. It’s harder, more time-consuming, and more costly to develop for the many different Android handsets out there. Developing for iPhone is much easier. Even now, there are a good few iOS exclusives that will likely never make it to Android… iOS is the undisputed leader in mobile. Developing for all the different phones on Android is part of the problem, but the Play Store’s inability to stop clones and piracy is another. For instance, only 5% of users on Android devices paid for the wonderful game Monument Valley when it came out last year. 40% paid for the game on iOS.
4. Security: We learned recently about a new vulnerability at the heart of Android being referred to by researchers as Stagefright. Now, Google has released a patch designed to fix this flaw—a patch it’s had since April—but researchers say the patch is so flawed, it doesn’t do anything to actually protect users. [Plus, even if it worked, many users are not likely to get it anyway] due to Google’s reliance on manufacturers and carriers to execute software updates and distribute fixes.
Kain writes, “Ultimately, the combination of excessive bloatware, a dubious app store, worse games, and frightening security flaws means that no matter how pretty and zippy an Android phone may be, no matter how nice its camera, it will still lag way behind Apple when it comes to software and reliability.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Why anyone would subject themselves to Android is beyond us. We’re still trying to figure out what’s wrong with the Windows PC sufferers. Must be Stockholm Syndrome.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “petelp” for the heads up.]