Is Android Only Surging Because Apple Is Letting It?

Yes, the market share picture is very different outside of the US; see my previous comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1665780

I can't but agree with MG... even when he is an apple fan boy diehard... for the most part everything he writes has some point of trueness.

For me, as a entrepreneur and with a product targeting both platforms, the experience with android has made me think twice the whole idea of iphone and its appstore stupidity, in a way where it makes me believe they are there for a reason.

Apple provides probably the best user experience for a mobile phone out there, everything is consistent, simple and geared to make the life of their users likewise... and apple enforces this but also they provide tools so that we as developers stay that way with not too much pain.

Android on the other hand stays too much to its Linux parenthood... yes it's open, yes you can do lots of stuff with it, it even can power the coffee pot if you wanted it to... but everything comes at a price! And the price that google has have to pay for that "flexibility" comes in direct impact of the experience... and microsoft seems to have learnt this too, hence the level of control they are putting back on the WP7.

Google has to pick up the ball while there is still time... provide developers with the right tools so we don't go reinventing the warm water everything we need to do something and provided them so that it remains consistent with the experience the have created with the phone... and enforce OEMs to do the same.

Now will google do this before apple pulls the trigger on new carriers for the iPhone or before WP7 takes power?... I hope so, as competition is always good for innovation.

in the mean time I will keep my Galaxy (with its 12+ carrier stupid apps) at lab for testing purposes and will carry my iPhone for the every day experience.

I personally haven't seen this kind of discussion change a single opinion.

As for the title question, we've all seen the customer satisfaction numbers and the willingness to switch numbers: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/smartphones/?p=816, so I think, hinging on the credibility of these data, it's an empirical fact that iPhone stands a lot to gain by going to Verizon. If you're an iPhone developer, like myself, these data ought to be reassuring.

It's clear that the tech blogosphere and its core readership have a hint of counter-consumerist taste which makes it very bad at predicting the success of consumer products (we've seen a ghosts from 2007 this weekend on HN, and I suspect the "iPad will fail" articles are bound to crop up and bite certain bloggers later). The remedy (please) is some good old fashioned market research if we're going to make business/startup decisions based on such discussions. Eh?

PS: The top comment of this TechCrunch article is perpetrating this "Big Brother" analogy with respect to Apple's app store approval. As an English major, this has been bothering me for a while. Have these guys read 1984? "Big Brother" is supposed to represent the panopticon surveillance state, you know, one where your footsteps are tracked and recorded constantly. Sounds more like someone else to me.

There must have been some sort of "out" for Apple in their contract with AT&T. I've never seen a contract without some sort of early termination section. (I'm not a lawyer, but I work with them on business contracts often.)

It must be a prohibitively large dollar amount for Apple to end the agreement early, which is surprising since I think it's been far more successful than anyone could have imagined -- so I assume what would have at launch seemed like a ridiculous sum would now be quite affordable for Apple to remove the 100lb gorilla in the room.

I've done some Android development and didn't think it was that bad. It was definitely something of a struggle at first (not the least because I hadn't used Java - er, a Java-like-language - since my freshman year of college), but it grew on me quickly and it didn't take me long to internalize most of the important design patterns. That being said, I've never done any iPhone development, so I can't really compare.

As to the phones themselves, I don't think its as clear cut as the author suggests. I bought a first generation iPhone, but when it eventually met its demise I picked up a G1 on eBay. The G1 was obviously pretty horribly specced, but I liked enough about it to eventually got a Nexus One and rather like it. Its lacking a lot of the polish of iOS, but seems generally a lot more capable. I don't know anything about the history of using a back button for navigation through multiple applications, but that and a few other things (the notification UI for example) really pay off for Android.

I'll probably get another iPhone at some point (I'm still on AT&T and have never gotten a subsidized phone from them - I got that original iPhone before they subsidized them) to play with development on it, if nothing else. But for my primary phone I'm probably going to stick with Android, at least for the foreseeable future. Its far from perfect but it works a lot better for me.

Of course I'm not at all your typical phone user, so what I think probably doesn't mean that much.