Give Me Back My iPhone!
Android is a wonderful operating system. But most Android phones are crap.
Six years ago, Google launched an unconventional effort to gain a
toehold in the growing smartphone business. Rather than make its own
phones, the way Apple was beginning to do, the search company decided to
make only half a phone: just the software to run the device, not the
device itself. Google planned to give its operating system, called
Android, to phone makers for free, and it would let them alter the OS in
any way they liked.
Google thought that in the long run, the plan would pay off in two
ways. First, it believed a free OS would push phone makers to create
better Web-enabled phones, and better phones would let people spend more
time on the Internet. More time online means more opportunities to use
Google’s service and see Google ads—i.e., ka-ching! Android
also provided a strategic benefit: If phone makers adopted Google’s OS,
the search company would retain some influence on the devices people
used to get its services. If it weren’t for Android, Google’s customers
would have been using devices controlled by Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, or
RIM, all of which had incentives to limit Google’s reach. Android lets
Google control its own destiny.
The strategy worked brilliantly. Android is now the
world’s most popular mobile operating system. It’s unclear if Google makes much money from Android directly—by
some estimates
Google makes as much from ads on Apple’s iOS devices as it does on
Android machines. But there’s no question that Android has helped lower
the prices of smartphones across the globe, which can only help Google’s
ad business. It’s hard to call Android anything other than a resounding
success.
Well, except for one small thing: Most Android phones are crap. As part of a
New Year’s resolution, I promised to trade in my
beloved iPhone 5
for an Android phone sometime in 2013. I reasoned that, as a tech
writer, I should spend more time with the world’s most popular operating
system. Phone makers and carriers have regularly sent me Android phones
to test out in the past, but I’d never given most of them more than a
passing look—I’d open them up, turn them on, get aggravated by their bad
keyboards or poor touchscreens or frustrating add-on software, and I
immediately package them up and send them back.
This shouldn’t be surprising—most Android phones are very cheap, and
you get what you pay for. Over the last few months, though, I’ve been
testing two of the most expensive, most advanced Android phones on the
market, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One. Actually, I’ve been doing
more than that. I’ve been using
two versions of each of these
phones—the standard phone that you get for $199 when you sign a two-year
cellular contract, and a second “Google Play edition,” which is a
special, full-priced version that features only the essential software
you need on a smartphone. (The Play edition
HTC one is $599, and the
S4 is $649.)
I’ve been switching between these four devices, using one or the other
as my primary phone at all times. Except for the brief period during
which
I tested out Apple’s new version of iOS, my iPhone hasn’t been charged in weeks, poor guy.
Altogether I experienced the best and worst of Android—and I saw, up
close, Android’s basic problem. I’d sum it up as follows. Google makes a
fine mobile operating system. Some phone manufacturers make attractive,
powerful Android handsets. These phones have the potential to be really
wonderful machines, even as great as Apple’s flagship phone. But then,
at the last second, the phone makers and the world’s cellular carriers
snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They ruin the phones’ potential
with unnecessary features and apps that lower the devices’ battery life,
uglify their home screens, and make everything you want to do extra
annoying.
This is one of the most important advantages Apple has over Android
devices. When you buy an iPhone, it works exactly as Apple intended;
it’s never adulterated by “features” that the company didn’t approve.
But when you buy an Android phone, even a really great one, you’re not
getting the device that Google’s designers had in mind when they created
the OS. You’re not even getting the device that the phone
manufacturer—Samsung and HTC, in this case—had in mind. Instead you’re
getting a bastardized version, a phone replete with software that has
been altered by many players along the way, usually in a clumsy,
money-grubbing fashion.
