The difference between iPhone + Android: Great since day one

It will probably never happen. Linux committed suicide by making the ideological decision to have an unstable ABI for the kernel, making it all but impossible for a 3rd party to ship binary drivers that work across multiple versions of the kernel. Microsoft could barely sustain this even across major revisions of their OS (see massive hostility to Vista because they broke the driver model). But linux does it with every point release of the kernel.

It is silly to try and frame a comparison between iPhone and Android in 1-dimension. We could equally write an article criticizing the App Store and say the difference is about freedom of expression. Or about quality of apps. Or about power and flexibility. Or availability of media. Or hardware. Or half a dozen other things.

Guess what folks, there are many various differences! Personally I choose Android because I value the various dimensions on which it scores highly over those where the iPhone scores highly. But don't try and pretend there is only one dimension to this.

Perhaps a longer blog post needs to be dedicated to this, but I feel like much of the debate between iOS and Android focuses on the "fundamental differences" between Apple's particular approach (or call it philosophy) to mobile computing, and Google's. This might be a bit controversial, but I find it NOT an open and shut case that an "open, customizable" platform is an advantage.

Throughout history we've been struggling with the Google/iOS problem, but the debate took on different forms: totalitarian versus democratic government, planned economy versus "free" economy, big government versus small government. The question is: should certain kinds of decisions affecting a state be centralized or dispersed? In theory, dispersed power (among citizens, or users) should win the day, IF NOT for inevitable market inefficiencies (information asymmetries, NOISE, emotional human irrationality) and malicious private agents who prey on the uninformed. There is an argument to be made that computing platforms fall under this debate. I would argue that Google's open platform also makes it vulnerable to far too many exploits: viruses, buggy, crashing, battery-draining software, and adware that might indiscriminately display pornography. All for certain powers of customizability that I (and many others) find trivial. Like choosing system fonts and having video wallpaper.

If everybody in the world had the means to discriminate between spam software and non, then I would think that a system under which anybody could post software targeting any part of the system would be an excellent thing. But they can't. WE, as hackers can. Maybe. But for a majority of the people, they must enter into a "social contract" with a curator wherein decisions of quality and security are made for them in exchange for a price premium equal to or less than the value of time saved in "not worrying" about malicious code. Beautifully, this space is evolving to a cycle of two year hardware refreshes (less than that for hardcore users), and these serve as market voting mechanisms for the job or efficacy of the curator (in this case, Apple and Google).

In the United States (which some would argue is the apotheosis of enlightenment thinking of the government problem) we have deferred legislative power to a body that we pay to do the thinking for us. We cycle through this body periodically democratically (as we can in mobile). We certainly don't have time to ponder over the minutiae of certain articles of legislation. In the same way, I would argue, I don't have time to discriminate between one piece of software for compatibility, reliability, security and quality, and another making nearly identical claims to functionality. Maybe you do, and that's why you choose Android. Meanwhile, I'll trade certain features for peace of mind.

The only things I have to manually copy over to my Droid are music and video. Everything else (photos, contacts, email, docs) is just cached transparently from the cloud. This seems a lot simpler and more user-friendly to me than forcing a user to physically attach to a computer and worry about duplicates, overwrites, stale files etc. Isn't the whole idea to stop forcing users to think about files?

The only reason I have to manually copy music and video is bandwidth so it's likely that at some point in the near future those will also be handled for me.

Well, that's just like... your opinion, man.