Nothing Keeps Apple From Making an Android Phone Except Common Sense
businessweek.comApple has been doing the right thing all along. Because the very thing that enabled Apple to rise from near bankruptcy to just about the most profitable company in the history of capitalism is providing and controlling an integrated, soup-to-nuts hardware and software ecosystem. A big part of the reason why Android still feels so janky is that it has to cater to multiple hardware vendors and other stakeholders (carriers), as well as Google's advertising business, with the end user a secondary concern. Apple's total control enables it to make the user the highest priority.
The jankiest thing about Android (well, aside from crappy manufacturer skins and undeletable carrier spamware) is the pauses and delays in user response. Those all come from the disastrous choice to use Java as a programming language. User facing software always feels slow when it's subject to the performance losses of automatic memory management. Java is inherently garbage collected and low power mobile devices just multiply the performance failures inherent in that design.
Garbage collection is actually better for performance where instant response isn't important, such as in servers. In UI and realtime it always seems janky and slow.
But even the choice of Java is related to multiple hardware vendors. There was some idea initially that Android might run on non-ARM platforms. That hasn't turned out to be an important use of Android, but it probably helped push Android to Java initially.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The only part of Java used in Android is the syntax. The VM was written from scratch. In fact, Oracle took Google to court over allegations that Google had copied parts of the Java VM (and lost on the majority of counts, getting no payout).
And there is also the fact that I know it's not true because my phone (LG G2) has no problems with touch response.
It's important to note that it's the Java language, but not the Java bytecode or Java Virtual Machine that are used in Android. It could easily have been really any language that Google wished to provide a compiler for towards their custom bytecode/VM. It was somewhat arbitrarily the Java language but was a good business choice IMHO due to the prevalence of Java developers in the market.
Secondly, there's nothing stopping you from writing your apps in C/C++ to get whatever sort of response you need.
From what I've read on the net, using the NDK is not an ideal way to write Android apps. It's fine if you want to write an OpenGL game, but it doesn't interface well with the Android API.
I don't know enough about Java/garbage collection but I'm going to challenge your assertion that Java is behind poor UI response.
Okay, I'm listening.
> Because the very thing that enabled Apple to rise from near bankruptcy to just about the most profitable company in the history of capitalism
Adjusted for inflation I think that title still belongs to IBM through the 70s.
Or the East India Company if you want to go even further back.
Can you please elaborate? The East India Company never recovered from its episode of near-bankruptcy
Not the near-bankruptcy part, just the most-profitable part.
Thanks, beat me to it. Which leads me to ask, were IBM near bankrupt before roaring back?
The right thing that Apple did was build an manufacturer customized version of Unix (i.e. OSX) because Mac OS7, 8 and 9 had fallen behind the competition. Apple could very well succeed by forking/building on Android
I really don't get your logic here. They're already succeeding by building off their already customized version of Unix and putting it into a phone.
Stop using manufacturer-customised versions of Android then.
But that's exactly what the article is suggesting Apple creates.
The company that really disappointed everyone is Sony. Sony was Apple when Apple was beige boxes, and then Sony turned into just another commodity vendor when it comes to non-playstation hardware.
The new Xperia products give the hint that Sony is crawling out of that hole, but they have a long way to go.
Too true. I remember some of the razor thin VAIO's from many years before the Air was every a prototype. And that from a company that was a leading maker of floppy disks no less.
If it wasn't for that quote from Woz, pretty much everyone would go 'well that's ridiculous'. And it is, it is ridiculous, Apple would still want a hardware premium because that's the business model, so they wouldn't be able to try and out price the other manufacturers. They'd gain nothing from it. People that want an iPhone want it for the hardware software combination.
> People that want an iPhone want it for the hardware software combination.
I'm not so certain that's case. Today the iPhone is at least feature comparative to Android (turn by turn navigation, LTE, decent google integration and hangouts) - but Android still doesn't have as nice hardware as Apple.
I really wanted Nokia to start making Android devices because they do make beautiful hardware, but unfortunately they went to Windows phone. I'd imagine many android users would switch to apple made hardware if it was available.
Then apple would likely dominate the hardware market for both operating systems - which would be interesting.
I found the HTC One to be pretty solid, not as good as Apple but very nice and very well built. If I remember rightly the stats show a lot of the Android sales are low-to-mid range hardware, so there's possibly not as much reason for companies to build really high end phones if they don't think there's a market.
The HTC One is beautiful, but the battery is atrocious - the iPhone has an incredible battery. The Nexus 5 is also a really nice phone, but the hardware is still not as nice as the iPhone (I admit this is a bit subjective though).
I think you're right that most of the android sales are low to midrange hardware, but there are no real high end options except for the HTC One and Nexus 5 which are not readily available in stores. The Moto X was solid though too - shouldn't not mention that one.
I think people who use iOS probably would not jump to an Apple device running Android, but there are Android users who would jump from their samsung device to an Apple one.
I don't think Apple would do this because they want control over their ecosystem and they want to force people into iTunes, Apple TV, iBooks, iMessage etc, but I don't think it's necessarily a terrible idea.
I'd heard about the battery life, which is a shame as I thought the HTC One could be the one (no pun indeed) to get me to think about switching to Android for a while.
I do see your point about bringing people from Samsung to Apple, but I'm not sure there's enough that would be tempted that it'd make it worthwhile for Apple to actively pursue and put money into it.
Apple do want people actively in their ecosystem, but they could spread that to Android whenever they want anyway with some development time, as it is it keeps everything nicely uniform for users of iOS/OS X.
Everyone's boring opinions always appear to themselves as common sense. You see this all the time in politics too, and I'm becoming more and more suspicious every time someone uses it in an argument. If you have a good case, your best foot forward shouldn't be that it's popular and makes sense to you. Show, don't tell.
All the article really needed to say was "but then Apple fans would try an Android phone, realise the software is better (and likely start experimenting with having root access to their own hardware, which apple certainly dislike), then get an Android phone comparably specced to and cheaper than the iphone 6 instead of one come upgrade time".
>realise the software is better
At the risk of noshing down some trollbait, could you perhaps qualify this statement or are you just going to go with your subjectiuve view as fact?
As someone that owns both an Android and iOS phone I think Apple has nicer form factor than the various Android options but Android has superior software. Here's my quick thoughts. iOS has caught up in a lot of the features it was missing early on (multi-tasking) but it still lacks widgets. It may not be for everyone, but I use two widgets on my desktop daily and Apple's answer to it in the notification center is bleh. I originally liked Apple's Passbook but Google's Wallet and Now surpass it in features and in some ways usability. By this I mean Google automatically creates cards for my packages from UPS without any effort for me at all. It also keeps track of my boarding passes, tickets, etc with no effort. Apple's solution requires (generally) that I open an e-mail attachment or something. Last but not least are the Google Apps, most notably Maps but it does include the others. iOS is made better by Google software and most iOS users I know use one or more Google apps. In a full Google platform though the integration is superior. Let's say I'm sitting at my desktop and search for a restaurant. The next time I open Google Now it'll have a card with that restaurant and allow me to navigate there in a single touch.
Google Now is just the coolest thing. I really hope we see more of thin kind of thin, especially in terms of integration.
Noticing that Now and Glass are clearly made for one another - this gives me a lot of hope for where Glass might be in say, five years.
Well, it's open source, but past that, it allows installs from outside a store, has far greater user customisability, better notifications, a better desktop separate from the app launcher menu, and is far more hospitable to users having full access to the hardware they actually own.
Android is open source for a very stretched definition of open source.
The bitcoin wallet apps are better on Android for one.
I am always surprised when people start talking about specs for phones. This has never once been an input into my buying decision for me.
It's been one of the primary ones (can run CyanogenMod, spec, has SD card and physical buttons, looks, screen size, removable battery) for me each time.
By "specs" do you mean size and camera quality etc. , or just processor speed?
>People like the precious looks of stylings and manufacturing that we do in our product compared to the other Android offerings.
Is he essentially saying, people who admire the iPhone hardware, do not really admire iOS? Or Am I missing something. Taking into account the premise of Steve, Apple should make Windows Laptops too?
They do make Windows Laptops. All you have to do is provide a copy of Windows.
That being said, few people would buy an Apple phone without getting the iOS.
Samsung has pretty much captured the market for Android phones for people who admire iPhone hardware, so Woz isn't completely misguided.
I just don't see the upside for Apple. Does he think Apple can gobble up the Android market with well-made, high-quality Android handsets? It's not worth using your resources to manufacture lower-margin equipment when it could be used to make/sell higher-margin equipment.
From my understanding of how Apple Inc work, they are not really focused on market share. It could be one of their goals, but not their entire focus, instead they solely focus on producing products the best human can do and produce. Much like Merce or BMW, are they focused on market share like Toyota? No.
"And Android is outpacing Apple in the cheaper markets that are gaining importance, so there’s a sort of intuitive sense in the move, if you’re willing to twist the logic into uncomfortable directions."
s/Android/Windows/, move it back ten years, and then count how many PC OEMs are still in the business today.
Did I miss the part where "Businessweek" became a "how to light your money on fire" journal?
Instead of making an Android phone Apple should offer Bootcamp for iOS devices so any OS can run there. This works on Macs so why not offer it on iOS devices?
That only works as macs have an x86 architecture.
Most current smartphones are ARMv7, Apple's A7 stands out as a(n albeit slower) ARMv8 SoC. I'm not quite sure about the compatibility between the two, but at least iPhones 5/5C should be architecturally compatible.
Performance might be questionable, as current Android phones tend to be quad-core models clocked around 2 GHz while A6/A7 feature only two cores at around 1.3-1.4 GHz.
It's not just the CPU, they would have to provide Android drivers for networking, bluetooth, cameras, etc. ARM platforms aren't standardized like PCs.
I feel like it's almost a quirk of history that the PC has become home to so many different operating systems.
Hardware platforms that allow me to swap software on them are very few and far between. The fact that PCs were like this over 20 years ago and continue to be so to this day is amazing.
It's a shame that phone hardware didn't follow the same path. Android's openness (for varying levels of "open") is great and all, but I'm more interested in hardware openness. The Nexus line seems to be the current leader in openness + consumer availability + quality, but it's a shame there aren't more.