How Google kill Android
The Android was a strong answer to Apple mobile OS effort. Android was a leader for many years because provided an open source, less restrictive than iOS alternative with many nice capabilities. Say more, many interesting features of a mobile OS were pioneered by Google and then adopted by Apple. But, we can see now that iOS got over Android and say more Apple do not look at Google anymore to keep such features as messaging in sync with Google. Why? Answer is a very simple, Android now more restrictive OS than Apple’s one, not offering many features users could get before. A user of Android can’t do anything more than a user of iOS, and sometimes even less. Regarding a phone cost, Android doesn’t have advantages either. Cheapest iPhone costs around $400 still offering premium features as a wireless charging and a water resistance.
The situation is a really bad for all Android lovers. Google just blindly copy iOS.
If Apple is only one vendor for OS and phones, Google is different. So Google can’t decide what to do and what to not to do. Google always needs to look at big vendors as Samsung. Samsung itself a company follower. They afraid to introduce something own, because it can be risky. They prefer to copy the strongest competitor hoping to get sales in other regions than US. This strategy becomes very strong and now Google themselves follow it.
Several simple facts pushed me to stop doing apps for Android.
Look at the history. iPod is amazing device introduced by Apple in autumn of 2001. iPod has an interesting organization as a music device. Entire music collection is stored in a file system of the device, however a user of iPod never deals with the file system. Instead of that a user deals with itunesdb. This database covers entire music collection stored on the device. Adding, deleting music is possible only in sync with updating itunesdb, otherwise the changes won’t be observed by the device OS. Such approach has several benefits, first, music isn't stored randomly, it is organized to view a collection as different slices by a song name, but an album name, an artist name or a genre. Itunesdb record has a reference to an actual music file which can be anything and in case of iPod OS was just a number. You can get more details about itunesdb in my article [1]. Initially such organization has several benefits but primary that processors weren’t very strong and such organization of music saved extra CPU time to explore music. When iPod grew to a multifunctional OS, initial music organization was preserved and allow to easy separate files keeping music, images, documents and other file types. Such approach made sense for Apple, they didn’t provide changeable file storage, they have only one music player and finally they supported only MP3 and Apple music formats. I do not know what was a drive for Google, but after almost 20 years they decided – we need to do the same thing as Apple. Funny thing that they even copied Apple’s approach, if you want to access a music collection item, then it will look like content://media-12345678, hiding all storage details. Unfortunately Google did it completely forgetting that Android isn’t iPod. Putting same constraints as Apple did just will make Android a worse copy of iOS.
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From this point, Google lost any advantages over Apple. Generally Google just killed a niche of music players. Google argumentation that they just improved OS security sounds ridiculous. Nobody can steal now your DSD music collection, but you can’t listen to it either. It isn’t major functionality – will be Google’s answer. People can argue – how many people need custom music players and support not very common music formats as DSD? This niche certainly isn’t very huge just few millions. But that millions were hard users of Android without any intension to migrate to iOS, but not anymore.
As you can see, one problem will create another. For example Google recognize personal safety apps. It is certainly very important applications, but even there Google are heavily lacking here. They consider that a safety app can send SMS in a danger situation. However, they completely overlooked the case when app can send SMS when everything is normal and do not send otherwise. It is very obvious situation, you say your kids – call me when reach library or other destination. If you didn’t get a call, you consider your kid can be in trouble. Another case, a phone can be stolen, or just battery ran out of juices,so the phone can’t send SOS. But Google doesn’t recognize such situation, a big class of applications are banned. Worst thing is that Google simply made Google phone not a safety device. If you know, Apple work in opposite direction and even added satellite emergency calling.
Trying to improve security, they just destroyed many useful applications. Worst thing, they didn’t improve security at all.
I gave just two cases I see obvious Google’s mistakes, but people can name more of them. And we can see a clear proof of that – Android sales are fallen behind of Apple. Will Google change the situation? It is hard to say now, but more likely no.
1. "Java NIO & the iTunes Database" Dr. Dobb's journal #355 December 2003, p. 36-46.
How google kill Android