Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Tomorrow, Wednesday the 28th is a big day for Google’s Android operating system.  The biggest carrier in the USA will launch its first Android-powered device.  You’ve read the reviews, you’ve seen the galleries, you’re ready to go.  But what do we really know about Android?  There are some downsides, right?

The Adware attack

That is the argument presented by RoughlyDrafted.  The site takes a long look at how Google will use Android to hunt you down like the depraved internet addict you are.  Android is reduced to nothing more than mobile adware:

Google is an adware vendor. You may decide that this is an acceptable tradeoff, but you can only do that if you actually stop and weigh the costs yourself. It’s completely delusional to blindly buy into Android as the free lunch with no strings.

This attack is a tough one to qualify for consumers.  Roughly Drafted presents it as a free lunch problem (you’re paying at some point, we just don’t know when).  Will it matter to consumers?  Tough to say, the problem with this line of thinking it, the experience is open-sourced so any forced ads are likely to be circumvented in short order.

The no good app attack

Robert Scoble makes an interesting case for why iPhone users are trapped in their world.  The reason?  100,000 apps.

“...now that Apple has apps the world has changed and challengers to the iPhone will find it very tough.  Here’s why: everyone is using a different set of 20 apps. Trillions of combinations. You can see this on Appsfire’s VIP list (my iPhone apps are listed there, along with a number of others). None of us have the same set of apps.

So, to get me off of the iPhone you are going to have to duplicate all my apps (and I’ve gotten several more since doing this list a couple of weeks ago).”

Scoble makes a very real and interesting point: if you’re hooked on the almost infinite variety of apps, moving off that platform gets very difficult to do.  For example, in the past week I’ve used RunKeeper (a program to track my exercising by GPS),  AT&T Navigator for turn by turn, Navionics for navigating by boat, 6 games, Geocaching and eBay.  Each iPhone could be as diverse in apps as their owners personality making replicating the experience on another phone almost impossible.  You’re trading down.

No good apps in the future attack

To fix Scoble’s app problem, Om Malik offers up some data.

“With a number of Google’s Android OS-based smartphones on the horizon, developers are devoting significant resources to the mobile platform, which will result in a boom in Android apps, according to reports from two Silicon Valley startups, Flurry and AdMob. Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile metrics company, today said that it had seen an unprecedented 94 percent increase in the number of projects started by Android developers between September and October. “

More phones on more networks could work to get Android closer to the Apple App store. Om points out the disparity between earnings for developers between the iPhone and Android platform.  Om loosely suggests that the marketing muscle behind Android will help this cause as well.

Om does not come down on one side or another here, merely points out that we just don’t know.  There could be a boom, offering benefits to Android users and providing a serious threat to iPhone dominance.  The flip side is also possible, users don’t give a darn about what OS their phone is running as long as they can call, text and Facebook, the world is a good place.  What more do you need?

Summary

Android-haters have little tangible to hate.  We’ve seen the “in the bush” potential threat of Google doing evil things and turning your phone into mobile spyware.  We’ve seen the argument of being locked into an app environment and we’ve seen arguments that an Android app boom is looming. 

What does that mean for potential buyers of Verizon’s Android Droid phone(s)?  Personally, I think it means flux.  We don’t know quite what to make of Android yet.  Today it is a very usable OS that is about to get a lot of new users on multiple carriers on a variety of phones with multiple form factors.  Users coming from another other phone other than the iPhone are bound to get excited about the apps and open environment.  Chances are good you’ll like your phone more as time goes on as more apps build in and potentially bad as Google shows more of it’s hand.