The Technology Stig

Being a part of an industry which makes applications for mobile phones, i constantly come across statements such as “Andorid is the future”, “IPhones will rule”..etc . While both the platforms are indeed excellent in terms of their features & functionalities, i’m not willing to bet that either of them in their current form will win the battle of the future!.Here’s why

Android:

Android is Google’s offering to the Smartphone OS world.Mobile devices are an important medium through which people access the internet.Getting into this was an obvious extension of Google’s internet strategy.What has worked for the Android OS  so far is that it is  free and open source.This essentially means that OEMs can manufacture phones based on the OS without having to pay any royalty/license fees.But this, in my opinion is the very same reason why it’s not going to be the OS of the future.With google not ‘owning’ the OS anymore, it will not be able to control what goes into it,the specs of the devices which carry the OS among other things.This will lead to fragmentation and customization of the OS to the point where OEMs would compete to build their own software layers on top of the OS.There will be no one single “Android Experience”.OEMs will come out with different flavours such as touch screen,non touchscreen,different resolutions such as QVGA,VGA,WVGA..etc all matched to suit different price points for their device.Something like this is already happening with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS, and we all know what it’s current situation is like!.And for software developers it’s only going to turn into a nightmare making sure that their software works on all flavours of the Android OS while having a consistent user experience.

IPhone:

Apple’s IPhone OS will not suffer from the problems which will eventually plague the Android OS.Apple owns the OS, the device specifications and controls what softwares can go into it(via the App Store).This is what the ‘Apple experience’ is all about.Consistent device behavior,specifications and features will lead to a consistent user experience.But this also has it’s disadvantages.Apple will never come out with a range of phones to cater to different market segments.Eventually human tendency and need for change is not going to be satisfied by Apple merely upgrading it’s OS from time to time.People will want to change devices ,get newer ones and there will come a time when they will not be satisfied exchanging an Iphone for another Iphone!

My guess is the smartphone OS market is going to continue to be fragmented and no single OS is going to have a significant share of the market.As is currently happening  Symbian OS is going to continue to constitently loose it’s majority market share till there is  an equillibrium amongst all smartphone OS.