Google Android OS to takeover iPhone OS in two years?

[Prof.]

Watch out, iPhone—Android's nipping at your heels.

Researchers at Gartner (via AppleInsider) are predicting that the global market share for Google's Android mobile OS could overtake the iPhone's in a little over two years, with Android poised to leapfrog Apple into the No. 2 spot.

That would leave the iPhone in the No. 3 position—right where it is now, behind BlackBerry and Nokia's Symbian OS, according to Gartner. The industry researchers believe that by 2012, Research in Motion (the company behind the BlackBerry) will have lost 7 percent of its market share, causing it to slip into fifth place (behind even Windows Mobile). Android, meanwhile, will get a 12.9-percent boost to become the No. 2 smartphone platform in the world, with Symbian still safe in the No. 1 spot (with a dominating, although dwindling, 39 percent of the global market).

Those are just analyst predictions, of course, and two years is an eternity in the wireless world; after all, two years ago today, we were still getting used to the first iPhone.

That said, I think the gist of Gartner's prediction—that Android is poised to take the wireless market by storm—is spot on, and we've seen evidence of that in the past few months and weeks.

Google's open-source Android platform—which boasts one of the finest touchscreen interfaces out there, iPhone included—came slow out of the gates in fall 2008 with the solid, if uninspiring T-Mobile G1. We had to wait almost a year for the next Android phone in the U.S., but we finally got one this past August with the G1's follow-up, the HTC-made myTouch 3G (also on T-Mobile).

Soon after, what started as a trickle quickly became a flood. Sprint trotted out its first Android phone, the eye-catching, touchscreen HTC Hero, and then T-Mobile followed suit with the Motorola Cliq, its third Android handset ... followed by the Samsung Behold II just a few days ago. On Tuesday, Verizon Wireless announced it would launch a pair of Android phones before the end of the year, while Sprint announced its second Android phone—the Samsung Moment—a day later. Oh, and now there's rumors that Dell wants in on the Android action, with a new handset possible slated for iPhone carrier AT&T.

Let's see, that's ... one, two, three, four ... five new Android phones in in the past few months, with two more—and possibly even a third—due by the end of the year, from two (or maybe three) different manufacturers and three (possibly four) carriers. Some will be better than others, but consumers will have plenty of models (and carriers) from which to choose.

Of course, a bunch of new phones on the market doesn't mean diddly unless someone buys them, and for now, Apple has a solid 10.8- versus 1.6-percent lead over Android in terms of global smartphone market share. But Apple is the only company making iPhones, while the open-source (and high-quality) Android platform is available to all manufacturers and carriers—and from what we've been seeing, they're taking the ball and running with it.

LINK

 

[iPhone 62S]

http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/10/so-here-is-issue-with-android.html

 

[matttye]

There is something that rings true with this.

HTC built a whole new GUI on top of Android, so that shows you how much more can be accomplished than on the iPhone "sandbox" at present.

If Apple wants to stay in the game they really need to open up the platform a bit more.

 

[milani]

If anything is going to hurt the iPhone it will be when developers start migrating to more friendly or viable platforms. As it stands now, no other manufacturer can provide an environment with millions of customers to developers, and that, if anything, is going to determine Apple's success moving forward. I'm not saying that Android won't have a flourishing development community moving forward, but the idea of having 10 million customers (which Apple gives you full access to) is pretty hard to turn down.

Also, as fake Steve points out, the fact that developers will have to make their apps compatible across a range of instantiations of the Android OS means that either A) they'll have to spend more time, and more money, and thus potentially be more attracted to the relatively unified dev platform the iPhone offers, and/or b) they simply won't bother making their apps compatible across the range of products and focus on one specific device (thus limiting the combined effect of all those different Android devices on the iPhones marketshare).

A particularly relevant quote from the discussion on the fake Jobs' site:

You've clearly never developed a mobile app that ran on more than one phone. If you had you would realize that different phones implement different features in slightly different ways. It is not just the vkp! It's network I/O, crypto, graphics, fonts, and layout. When you combine the shear number of combinations that can vary between all of the different handsets running, supposedly, the same platform, the problem domain is pretty daunting.

Luckily, people who take this job seriously work very hard to make their apps run on as many variations of the top OS's as possible. The iPhone is a very pleasant platform to work with because it does not vary from model to model in significant ways. The iPhone is not without it's nuances. There have been backward compatiblity issues with new versions of the iPhone OS, but these are manageable and Apple has even corrected one or two when they were brought to their attention.

 

[ruinfx]

If anything is going to hurt the iPhone it will be when developers start migrating to more friendly or viable platforms. As it stands now, no other manufacturer can provide an environment with millions of customers to developers, and that, if anything, is going to determine Apple's success moving forward. I'm not saying that Android won't have a flourishing development community moving forward, but the idea of having 10 million customers (which Apple gives you full access to) is pretty hard to turn down.

Also, as fake Steve points out, the fact that developers will have to make their apps compatible across a range of instantiations of the Android OS means that either A) they'll have to spend more time, and more money, and thus potentially be more attracted to the relatively unified dev platform the iPhone offers, and/or b) they simply won't bother making their apps compatible across the range of products and focus on one specific device (thus limiting the combined effect of all those different Android devices on the iPhones marketshare).

A particularly relevant quote from the discussion on the fake Jobs' site:

you clearly didnt take the time to scroll down the page and read the rest of the comments, because if you had you would see how uninformed the article writer is.

 

[kate-willbury]

umm, the only reason its 'easier' to develop for the iphone is because the thing has essentially NOT changed since the first iphone 2g.

theres already a small gap between 3gs and 3g/2g owners as only one side can get augmented reality apps. is this a big deal right now? not really. but as more features are introduced to the hardware with each revision, more and more people will slowly be left behind and limited in the apps they can choose to run. developers will have to choose who they're gonna have to leave out when they write their next app.

so yah, if you expect the next generation iphone to basically be nothing but a hard drive capacity bump, then alright, i guess app developers will have it 'easier'.

meanwhile, i do agree that android phone will easily overtake iphone os. lets face it, the apple fanboys posting there clearly try to make the whole "omg you have to make it compatible across SO MANY google phones!" more profound and difficult than it really is.

and if its so much easier to develop for a platform that has similar hardware across its development base, why am i still able to find 10000000x more options for specific software on windows (which has to run on an infinite amount of hardware configurations) than i can for my macbook? do mac fanboys seriously think its "so much harder" to develop for windows?

theres a reason why API's exist.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

already posted
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/799320/