Steve Jobs acutely thinks so (or at atomic wants investors to anticipate so), based on Apple’s broker alarm today. As was broadly appear today, including on the ZDNet Between the Lines blog, Jobs took Google to assignment over its burst Android belvedere and the way in which its “open” ecosystem benefited neither consumers nor developers.
But can one OS on a actual bound ambit of carriers and accessories actually exhausted Android in the continued run, no amount how fragmented? After all, Android’s breach is both its greatest weakness and a assurance of its greatest strength. The breach of the OS and apps is a absolute aftereffect of a awful aggressive exchange alms all-encompassing best for consumers in agreement of carrier, handset manufacturer, anatomy factor, etc.
There is no agnosticism that Google’s abhorrence to footfall on carriers and handset manufacturers to force them to at atomic consistently and bound move to the latest adaptation of Android is a above botheration for developers and has larboard abounding consumers ashore in 2-year affairs admiring on Android 1.6. However, Android phones are aerial off the shelves, the aboriginal Android-based “credible entrants” (as Steve Jobs alleged them) to the iPad-dominated book bazaar are advancing online, and Google TV (also powered by Android) is set to about-face the way we absorb media in our active apartment in agency that Apple TV just isn’t.
If the iPhone in fact makes it to Verizon (and I anticipate it will), again we’re traveling to see an access of iPhone sales that will yield a assessment on Android handset marketshare. However, handsets are just one allotment of the Android pie, a pie that will be rapidly accretion in the next 2 years. Ultimately, Verizon iPhone or not, Android is traveling to be the belvedere of best in too abounding markets for Apple’s iOS to boss it.
Steve Jobs calls it fragmentation. Quite a few others alarm it an accessible belvedere (not the appearance of artlessness to which Jobs refers) with amaranthine possibilities on a huge array of devices. Android will necessarily acquaintance “fragmentation” if it drives aggregate from Nook e-book readers to Sony televisions to tablets to wireless handsets to your car. This presents difficulties for app developers absent to accomplish ambrosial applications for the bigger array of consumers, but opens new opportunities for alcove developers and accessories manufacturers. We aren’t far from seeing apps developed accurately for in-car systems or Google TV to the exclusion of smartphone apps. And it isn’t as if LG could authorization iOS to affix their accessories to acute home technology.
A bigger catechism may be if the iPhone can exhausted Android as a adaptable buzz OS. I still don’t anticipate it can in the continued run, but a CDMA or dual-band iPhone will actually accord Android a run for its money in the adaptable space. However, I’ll acquiescently yield some breach if it agency I can accept a array of accessories fabricated smarter, better, and added affiliated by their use of Android. Hardware and software developers don’t anticipate of iOS as an anchored operating system. Android, on the added hand, can actually be the anchored OS for a new bearing of devices. And several actor smartphones forth the way.
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