I was recently asked a simple question, but it turned out to be awfully difficult to answer: “What is the difference between iPhone and Android?” It was asked, quite obviously, by a lay person. First of all, the question is wrong. The iPhone is a specific type of phone, whereas Android refers to the software that runs on a variety of phones. The correct comparison would be between iOS and Android. It’s precisely because a lay person asked the question that makes answering it rather complicated.
I could start off by trying to clarify the terminology, but I’m sure that person couldn’t care less about it. To lay people, the iPhone is one type of phone, and Android is that other type of phone. So, I thought for a few moments about how I would structure my explanation about the difference between the iPhone and Android powered smartphones, in a manner that a lay person would understand and appreciate. Then I realized, it is not so much the technology under the phones that matter, but the lifestyle and ecosystem that surrounds the phones. That’s what matters, probably, for ordinary people.
You see, not everyone are techies. They don’t buy phones because of the operating system that powers them, the availability of source code to the operating system that powers them, etc. They buy phones because the phones look nice, because someone (or just about everyone) has the same thing, because of that killer application that someone else has on that phone, etc.
Furthermore, the truth is that nowadays, people are buying Android phones not because of Android, but simply because some of the Android phones really do look pretty good. Some users are techie enough, for example, to care about hardware features like resolution of the camera, are also finding that Android phones are equal match or sometimes even better than iPhones. The Android in Android phones isn’t something that many users of Android phones actually care about.
So, now, back to the original question, how are Android phones different from iPhones? I think, it is about the experience. With iPhones, the entire experience has been carefully engineered and controlled by Apple.
You can always easily tell that an iPhone is an iPhone, not just because of the physical aspects of the device, but also by the look and behaviour of its software. The experience extends to how the phone interacts with a Mac or PC (via iTunes, although Apple is removing that dependency), and that experience also extends to the App Store and how you acquire 3rd party applications to install onto the iPhone. I’m assuming no jailbreaking here (remember, I’m talking about lay people, they don’t jailbreak phones). Apple’s quality control, or basically, just overall control, over 3rd party applications determine what gets distributed through its App Store.
The Android world, as you might have heard, is fraught with fragmentation. There are so many manufacturers selling Android phones. No doubt all of them run Android, which you might have expected it to unify the experience of the phones, but each manufacturer wants to differentiate their product and hence, try to sell their own experience. An experienced Android user has the option of dumping the manufacturer’s software and replace it with a purer Android experience, but ordinary users won’t do that, and they will go along with whatever the manufacturer provides.
Just take for example, Samsung’s various “Hubs”. The Social Hub includes instant messaging (Gtalk, Yahoo Messenger, and Windows Live Messenger) and social networking (Facebook and Twitter) integration. Yeah, nevermind that the pure Android already has Gtalk, and there is a Facebook for Android app, but this is Samsung’s way of selling their exclusive experience.
But guess what? Sony Ericsson has Timescape. Motorola has MotoBlur. HTC’s Sense isn’t quite competing on the same front, but it is something of their own that they try to sell too. I don’t know how each one of them compares with each other. However, one thing is pretty clear: While Android as a whole may be selling as well as Apple is, each of the manufacturer’s brand of Android hasn’t achieve the same level of market dominance.
This can be a good thing too. It means customers have more choice. In fact, even if customers have already been sold on to a particular phone manufacturer’s brand of Android, they still have plenty of choices for the Android phone.
It is not such a good thing if you consider that ordinary users have complicated choices to make. Furthermore, it also means users can now compare and realize how one brand of Android could be better or worse in some ways or other ways. Users are presented with difficult choices, and no one likes dilemmas, so this might lead to complaints about the platform.
It’s different in the world of iPhones. Steve Jobs decrees (or at least he used to) how things are supposed to work. Users don’t have to think. There is nothing to choose. Just listen and follow. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Some people don’t need to have choices. Their choice is to not have to choose. They want something that just works. If it doesn’t work, they want help readily available. If they’re told that the thing they’re asking about isn’t supposed to work, they’ll be happy to accept that as a limitation and consequence of the choice they made. The iPhone is for them. (Remember, I’m talking about ordinary phone users, people who don’t jailbreak.)
Android phones, on the other hand, offers choice. But exercising their choice could mean more work for users. They could certainly end up being very happy with their phones too.
So, that’s how iPhones are different from Android phones.
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