The Android Invasion Cometh; Is Resistance Futile? 410
DeviceGuru writes "Last month, we learned from Gartner that Android will probably be the number-two worldwide mobile OS this year, and may lead the pack by 2014. With Android's growing use as the OS embedded in phones, in tablets, in set-top boxes, and in LCD HDTVs, it seems like the Linux-based OS could end up dominating the entire non-PC consumer device operating system space. What do Slashdot readers think: Is resistance futile?"
There is still long way to go (Score:4, Interesting)
The "problem" is the same as with Opera. People think it's not as widespread as it's barely in news and their stuff isn't blastered all over your face all the time. However Opera dominates on embedded devices, televisions (especially in hotels!), mobile phones, even Nintendo Wii.
Windows variants are also the same. Windows 7, Windows CE and Windows Mobile are majorly used but it's not always so obvious. When you take a flight all the televisions in airports run Windows. When you go to ATM they run special version of Windows CE. Some hotel TV's also run Windows. With the upcoming Microsoft tablets and Windows Phone 7, it will get even more marketshare. Windows is also used pretty much in every organization and company.
If Android actually wants to take over all of that, it will be a long road. I hope they do, but I'm not so sure they will. Microsoft is good with business relationships and marketing and thats the point. It's not a small market and Windows is already dominating it.
Hopefully not (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd rather see MeeGo taking a sizeable portion of market from Android. With MeeGo, desktop Linux skills suddenly become very relevant in job market, and we'll get more desktop software (eventually).
With Android, Java skills are everything and... um... we got more people capable of doing Websphere/JBoss stuff? What a victory would that be.
Sigh... (Score:1, Interesting)
I for one, welcome our new Linux based non-pc consumer device operating system overlords!
Someone had to say it...
Re:There is still long way to go (Score:3, Interesting)
When you take a flight all the televisions in airports run Windows.
Agree with what you said for the most part, but I just wanted to point out that I think Linux is used behind the scenes too. For example, on a long flight back to the U.S. while I was flying with a major European carrier, the entertainment system crashed and I saw the Linux penguin pop up on the screen. I agree though: especially in the states, most of the displays you see on walls in buildings are Windows.
Yes, Android will win eventually (Score:1, Interesting)
Apple - being Apple - will continue to concentrate on the overall user experience of their mobile devices. They will retain their reputation as the maker of mercedes-benz smartphones and other consumer goods, but the sheer volume of Android-based competition will eventually swamp them out of the lower-end of the market. Apple could probably care less - Steve and co. are all about the total experience and crafting the perfect device, and that's fine - they can lead the market in innovation and be the brand that everyone aspires to become. But the droid wave must eventually wash over them and absolutely eat their low-end lunch, and since most of the world ain't rich, that mean most of the world is going to be droid-powered, unless Apple can undercut droid prices, and that just isn't how they roll.
desktops next (Score:5, Interesting)
most people reading here are desktop-centric, and the smartphone os is a secondary platform, in terms of work, play, and psychological orientation
but we are rapidly entering a world that is smartphone-centric, and the desktop os is a secondary platform, in terms of work, play, and psychological orientation. the whole desktop segment will be marginal
google can ride this psychological shift to get android/ chrome os onto the desktop market. the shift will be second nature, not an alien intrusion. and it will happen with a whimper, not a bang: who cares about the desktop except old people?
the only people making noise about this "big deal", this great promise of unseating microsoft in the desktop market, chattered about on slashdot for over a decade, will be old people. the idea of using a desktop will be a fossil idea, that only fossils will care about. like looking at greybeards from the 80s with their funny unix command line interfaces
in which case, "resistance is futile" is a good allusion, because google will be the new microsoft. cue bill gates slashdot borg icon morphing into a sergey brin/ larry page borg icon. nevermind that even the idea of "the borg" is a silly scifi notion from last century that only old people even care or know about
slashdot, we're showing our age
I still don't see that much android in NYC (Score:3, Interesting)
i take the subway and lately i've been seeing more iPhone 4's than Android phones. i've noticed that a lot of android phones look like an iphone 4, but overall i see a lot more iCrap than Andoid. could be all the people with ipod touches i see have android phones in their bags they aren't showing, but then what is the point of 2 devices?
when people ask me what they should buy i tell them that it doesn't really matter since they are 90% the same
Re:Hopefully not (Score:5, Interesting)
Alas, Nokia kind of missed the boat with Maemo/MeeGo. They let Maemo idle for years on the no-cellular tablets that were interesting, but never really went anywhere. Then they tossed the N900 out the door - just as they decided to massively rework the OS, effectively EOLing the N900's OS before it was released. Unsurprisingly, app developer interest has been ... limited. *I* know you can upgrade an N900 to MeeGo (when it's properly ready, hopefully) but Nokia hasn't been too clear on this and it's unlikely app devs will want to target a platform where users have to reflash to a new OS to run their apps.
I love coding with Qt and have wanted it in phones for ages, so I was really excited to see Maemo move over - but the timing, amid a product launch, was horrifying.
MeeGo would've been great if it (instead of Maemo half-way through an API breaking transition to Qt) was released in finished form at about the time the N900 hit market. Now, by the time it sees real-world products, I think Android will be pretty much unstoppable, especially as it's now allowing native apps, the main advantage MeeGo had. I don't rate it's chances.
Personally I like MeeGo a lot more as a concept of how a phone OS works. It's my phone, not the carrier's / handset manufacturer's phone that I happened to pay for. Unfortunately, carriers (especially in the US) don't like that, and given the likely higher prices and limited app coverage of MeeGo, I don't see it going far.
Were I Intel and Nokia, I'd be thinking very hard about offering Dalvik and .apk support for apps without native code, at least for a subset of Android API features. Get some app coverage from the start, but encourage targeting of Qt by offering Qt Jambi from Java and offering better API access via the native interfaces. Be a better Android than Android.
Re:There is still long way to go (Score:2, Interesting)
...most of the displays you see on walls in buildings are Windows.
Yep. Don't forget about this incident! http://gizmodo.com/5035456/blue-screen-of-death-strikes-birds-nest-during-opening-ceremonies-torch-lighting [gizmodo.com]
Re:desktops next (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Yes, Android will win eventually (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hopefully not (Score:4, Interesting)
With Android, Java skills are everything and... um... we got more people capable of doing Websphere/JBoss stuff? What a victory would that be.
You are free to use the Android NDK, develop your entire app in some other language, and write only the front-end in Java. But let's not let the facts get in the way of a good mad or anything.
Re:Hopefully not (Score:5, Interesting)
MeeGo (or in some cases Debian Lenny with MeeGo on top) will live on in some ways as a custom ROM for the Android phones. Many people are currently working on moving it over to phones like the Eris and the Droids. It gives these phones a useful lifetime beyond that of a phone. It can be useful having a phone sized device that can run things like snort or hit the local WiFi for a quick search while still leaving your phone free to make calls.
Re:There is still long way to go (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't have to worry about that. As an avid (and happy) Android user I can tell you: the open market is great, but the operating system is still a bit of a mess. Freezes, crashes and data losses are somewhat endemic. Each version is a little better, but it is years and years behind the iPhone for basic reliability, and all of the non-geek Android users I know plan to buy an iPhone when their contract is up. The geeks are happy and plan to stay.
My expectation is for smartphones (at least in the US) to eventually take the path of PCs, with Android as the Windows-analogue "most prevalent but somewhat buggy" OS, Apple as Apple, and everything else (Blackberry, WebOS, Maemo) as the "they work awesome but who uses them?" Linux distros.
Re:There is still long way to go (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't have to worry about that. As an avid (and happy) Android user I can tell you: the open market is great, but the operating system is still a bit of a mess. Freezes, crashes and data losses are somewhat endemic. Each version is a little better, but it is years and years behind the iPhone for basic reliability, and all of the non-geek Android users I know plan to buy an iPhone when their contract is up. The geeks are happy and plan to stay.
How on earth can you be HAPPY with that???
Re:iOS Short Term, Android Long Term (Score:3, Interesting)
And if iOS is the best platform ever, but no developers are developing for it... consumers (eventually) won't buy it, because they can get all the cool apps and features they want on Android.
I like iOS, don't get me wrong. I also think Google missed a huge opportunity to do right by consumers by forcing some of the 'if you want to call it Android, customers must be able to do X, Y, Z with this OS" issues (which may have prevented some of the increasingly carrier-restricted things we're seeing in Android). But you can't pretend that stock iOS devices with no developers putting out apps for them are going to compete with "anything goes" Android which will only continue to grow more polished & more functional over time.
iOS needs to compete for developers to stay relevant in the mobile space, and I think at some point Apple is going to have to either open iOS up to installing arbitrary packages without going through them, or throw out their guidelines and say "we will only stop listings where there is obvious bad behavior." I think they're more likely to allow arbitrary installs - then it's "You install it, your risk. Our app store is still clean & curated." - but allowing that would kill most of the serious criticism of iOS as an Android competitor. People will still carp about it being "not open source," but that's mostly irrelevant to the consumers, if they can install whatever software they want on the phone. Apple probably wouldn't lose a *significant* amount of business from the App Store by doing this, either. It'd make apps sort of like mp3s - Apple operates a store that they think is the best way to buy music, but if you want to buy through Amazon, or Emusic, or rip your own, well... you can still use them on your Apple device.
At this point, I'm most interested to see how iOS fares once the iPhone is available on more than one carrier in the US. I think the question that remains to be answered is, are people buying Android handsets because the iPhone isn't available on their carrier, and they don't want to switch to AT&T? Or are people buying Android handsets because they prefer them to the iPhone? I haven't seen any comparison of Android vs. iPhone sales specific to AT&T, so it'll be an interesting scenario to watch play out.
Re:Yes, Android will win eventually (Score:2, Interesting)
On shear volume, Android will probably win, if fo no other reason than (as others have said) Apple isn't competing in the low end market.
I develop for both -- I own an iPhone, and I bought my son an Android so I could test.
The Android's UI isn't nearly as nice as the iPhone's. There are a bunch of pay-for-me apps showing that can't be deleted. It's slower and more difficult to use. Now, some, maybe even all of that could be fixed by installing a newer version of Android (assuming it's finally available for the device). Certainly I could reinstall the OS on the thing and get rid of the the pay-for-me apps. But with the iPhone, I don't have to. No advertising crap is was on the phone when I received it. Yeah, Apple concentrates on the user experience, and that experience is *far* better than the current Android user experience.
The other issue is that Android is becoming very fragmented, and developers and going to get more and more frustrated in trying to test applications that work on one device and not another.
I was excited about Android when I first heard about it. But the reality is that Google has let it become much less than it could have been.
Sean.
Re:Hopefully not (Score:3, Interesting)
It's already on the Eris, granted it's cumbersome to use at the moment but it does work.
Re:There is still long way to go (Score:2, Interesting)
What about those of us geeks that LIKE WebOS? I mean, I can do everything that an Android user can do and MORE with WebOS, and WebOS makes it easier to do.
Tell me you Android users, can you patch your Android device with a kernel that allows for multiple types of adaptive overclocking? No? funny, I can with my Gen1 Sprint Pre using WebOS 1.4.5. In fact, I've been doing it for at least 3 point releases of WebOS.
Wait. Your Android device isn't getting an OTA update from your carrier? You can't even GET an OTA update because your only 6 month old device isn't compatible with Froyo? And you have to be even MORE of a carrier bitch and pay out more money just to get Froyo, but you can only get a gimped version with features missing?
REALLY?
I just don't see how you people think Android is "open" when it looks like only the CARRIERS have any real access to the phone without a complex hack that is only really possible for Alpha Geeks and is as lkely to BRICK your phone or cause the carrier to drop your contract as it is to unlock it.
Other than having a metric crapload of apps (about 99% garbage apps too.) you Android users appear to be getting LESS for your money than us WebOS users. Yeah, I have a device that's over a year old. At least my software is up to date, and uniform across all carriers and devices. Having a brand new Android device that's completely locked down and using a gimped old version of Android is like owning a Ferrari that has a Yugo engine and needs champagne as fuel. Flashy, expensive to use crap.
No thanks, I'll stick with WebOS.
Re:desktops next (Score:1, Interesting)
You are making a mistake in how you view smartphones. A smartphone doesnt have to be the same form factor. I can see a future in 2-3 years when I carry my smartphone around and it fills multiple roles.
1) When I am mobile it serves as a typical smartphone does now.
2) When I am home it docks into its cradle and from either a monitor or pico projector I have a big screen and ultilize a wireless mouse and keyboard
3) When I am in my car it docks and serves as navigation, music, traffic, etc from the built in screen and has built in controls as well.
etc.
Its not about being tied down and largely it will come down to contiued improvements in speed and reliance on a cloud for what cant be done on the phone (PCs will bridge the gap)
Re:... if Android focuses on the user experience (Score:3, Interesting)
Most people don't care about Flash, HD video or dual-core phones. People want phones that can do well the basic stuff one wants to do on a smart phone (email, news, maps. weather, calls (!)). And the iPhone is terribly good at that.
"Terribly Good" does describe calls on the iPhone. If I can make and connect on an iPhone, the call quality is good. But I wouldn't use it for long or important calls because I drop calls on AT&T multiple times a day no matter where I am. And I think that the longest call I've had without dropping is about 10-15 minutes. People just get used to you calling them back when a call drops with mobile phones now and AT&T / iPhone 3 are big offenders.
The one thing about calls I wish they'd fix on iPhone vs Android is call volume. All the Android phones out there have really loud volume capability. The iPhone is very difficult to use when it's loud (i.e. bar / train / etc) -- the speaker phone is not very loud either -- at least not loud enough to easily use for handsfree talking in my car -- when I'm driving on the highway, road noises and wind are nearly as loud as the iPhone speaker phone.
Re:There is still long way to go (Score:3, Interesting)
On the iPhone, you have a full apt package system, a terminal running bash, OpenSSH/OpenSSL tools, server, client, etc. a full GCC dev environement, etc.
A lot of this stuff is stuff you just don't get on Android at any level. You get a terminal out of the box with android, but what do you get? Busybox. Guh. Want SSH? You get Dropbear. The package system sucks compared to APT. I've never tried getting GCC running on the phone but I don't imagine it is easy, if at all possible.
With the iPhone I really feel like I have a full computer running in my pocket. I asked several android hackers why you are limited with these crappy tools on the phone itself, and they replied it was an embedded device so you get embedded tools. I'm sorry but something with 1-2 cores at >1GHz, a GPU that far outstrips anything on my earlier computers, and 32 gigs of NV storage is -not- an embedded device, I don't care how small it is.
You get all this, PLUS a UI that (only IMO I understand) is far more fluid and nicer to use than Android.
Don't get my wrong I'm not just yelling across the fence. I had a Nexus one for a good few months. I tried hard to like it, but in the end when the i4 came out, I jumped ship like it was on fire.
There is of course, hassle. I don't like to restore from backup so Every time there is a major firmware update I actually wipe my phone clean, then sync all my apps over fresh. But thanks to several tools out there it isn't a total restart.
There is hassle but for me, android has a LONG way to go, especially on the hacker front to be anywhere near the iPhone in terms of UI -AND- geekery.
Re:desktops next (Score:1, Interesting)
uhh us CODERS? a touchscreen offers nothing to a coder. The same way a 7 inch tablet or even 11 inch netbook tablet is insufficient space to develop on. Some of us actually do work requiring larger screens. WIDE Screens rotated vertically to maximize the amount of code you can see etc. ;) Last I checked your smartphone still has at best a 1.0 ghz single core. My desktop has 2.83ghz quad core... when do you think you can start compiling on your smartphone? Oh.
I'm one of the few people that refuse to even upgrade to a smartphone. I require my phone to make phone calls and text nothing more. Would it be convenient to have "apps" on it? maybe. But considering how much I use the apps on my current phone, chances are I would be like most people. Install apps and use them once or twice then forget about them for months until I have some use for it.
Am I watching the market and development of apps for the new smartphone platforms carefully? Yes indeed. But we are still a long way off from the time where your phone can double as your computer if you need to actually get work DONE.