Response to a 200% Increase In Android Usage

In response to a report claiming a 200% Android usage increase, HTCYou user David Chou was kind enough to contribute this blog post as a response:

Almost every large phone OEM has many Android platforms in the works, Motorola recently canned all their WinMobile and other designs and are moving everything over to Android. Similarly, Korean OEMs are heavily targeting Android and there will be plethora of Android phones soon in the market. Apple’s inherent advantage are the integration of their media content, applications, iTunes, etc. as well as having relatively “optimized” implementation of hardware and software integration - they control everything so that general performance will generally be superior than competing platforms.

WinMobiles suffered massively by not having a good software strategy, as well as putting out crappy products that were almost all designed by the phone OEMs with very little control which resulted in really poor performing devices. Google has a slightly modified approach in that it is working with several of these handset manufacturers to ensure the “better” interoperability, as well as an open platform to develop software. Another aspect is that there is the idea that phones are practically powerful enough, running 1 GHz+ processors, that performance becomes “good enough” and any additional performance benefit from Apple’s controlled integrated approach is minimized.

In summary Android is definitely on the way up and Apple is still up. With WinMobile and Symbian down, Palm’s web OS may be trending down due to being squeezed by the big boys.

Another interesting trend to follow is the big battle within Google between Android and Chrome (think 100% cloud computing, where almost nothing is running on the device, rather everything is done on the web/cloud). Completely two different teams with different philosophies. Current Android apps are not compatible with Chrome.

To guest write for HTCYou, let us know via our contact form.