Posts from Mobile operating system

Long title. Short post.

Daring Fireball says:

The utter simplicity of the iOS home screen is Apple’s innovation. It’s the simplest, most obvious “system” ever designed. It is a false and foolish but widespread misconception that “innovation” goes only in the direction of additional complexity.

"Designed" being the important word in that quote. Because we aren't done designing user interfaces. I think we are just getting started.

This piece in Wired got my head nodding because I am experiencing it every day on my Android phone. I find myself typing less and less on Android because the voice recognition is so damn good. And the type ahead prompts are like reading my mind. Instead of typing, I find myself selecting the next word more often than not.

Machine learning is the key innovation here. And in that area Google is so far ahead of every big company (and most small companies) that it is hard to imagine how they are not going to out innovate on the emerging user interfaces of our mobile future (glasses, watches, etc, etc).

Our policy at USV is that all of our devices need to have lock screens. So I have one on all my phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. I don't mind it very much. Except when I want to take a quick picture or video of something that is happening in real-time. In that situation, seconds can make the difference.

The folks I know who use iPhones can put their camera in front of the lock screen. I am not sure how they do that, but I know they do. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to do this on Android.

This is a cool feature. I'd like to call it out as something every mobile OS should have. If anyone knows how to make an Android device do this, please leave it in the comments. If it is not possible, then this post is a feature request to the Android team to make it happen in the next build.

Roughly six months ago, I put up a blog post suggesting Android was going to be the dominant mobile phone operating system and that developers interested in the largest user bases ought to start developing for it in preference to iOS.

As you might expect, I got a lot of heat from Apple fanboys for that post and one of the strongest points they made was that we had not yet seen the effect of the Verizon iPhone on market share numbers.

Well now we have. iPhone had a fantastic February on the back of a strong launch of the Verizon iPhone. comScore's February mobile numbers are out and here's where things stand in terms of OS market share in the US.

It looks like the Verizon iPhone launch is helping iOS hold its own with 25% of the market. I expect (and hope) that iOS will remain a strong competitor to Android. But as I've been saying for several years now, I believe the mobile OS market will play out very similarly to Windows and Macintosh, with Android in the role of Windows. And so if you want to be in front of the largest number of users, you need to be on Android.

A few other points are worth making. The numbers above are for the US. I believe Android will be stronger in the developing world than it is in the developed world. And most of the growth in smartphones is going to come from the developing world in the next five to ten years.

Finally, the reason for all of this is that Google is not attempting to monetize its mobile OS. It has created a business model for Android that is very attractive for handset manufacturers and allows these OEMs to drive down their costs rapidly while continuing to deliver a top quality smartphone experience. Bill Gurley of Benchmark wrote a great post about Google's mobile strategy earlier this week called "The Freight Train That Is Android". If you want to understand why this is happening, go read it.

UPDATE: This comment thread (almost 600 comments) is probably the most active comment thread in the history of this blog. The comments keep coming in five days later. Because I read and consider replying to every comment on this blog, this thread is creating a fair bit of work for me. And I believe we've had a very good debate about the issues this post raised. So I am closing comments on this post.