Submitted by Anders Batten on
Google Group Manager for Mobile Platforms, Rich Miner, jabbed at the Apple iPhone during promotion of Google's highly touted Linux-based Mobile OS, Android, at the Emerging Communications Conference in Silicon Valley this week. Despite the strong partnership between Apple and Google in the mobile arena, Miner evidently felt it necessary criticize the iPhone and the iPhone SDK in an attempt to highlight the strengths of the Android platform.
Miner offered up the following as an example of the inherent strength of the Android business model versus that of the iPhone, stating
"Once you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there's a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone. There's a single manufacturer, it's targeted at a particular demographic, and it falls far short of the 1 billion mobile phones sold every year worldwide."
In regards to the software development opportunities for each OS, Miner noted that the Android OS has been downloaded almost 8 times more than the iPhone SDK and said, "There are things I saw people doing with the first version of the Android SDK that it seems like you can't do with the iPhone at least at the moment".
It is worth mentioning, in fairness to Apple, that the Android SDK has been available for download since mid-November (123 days) while the iPhone SDK has only been available since earlier this month (8 days). You do the math.
Comments
Mark Sigal replied on Permalink
Ironically, in a recent post that looks at the potential of the iPod touch as the first mainstream Wi-Fi mobile platform, I anticipated that friends Google and Apple seem destined to become frienemies (ala Apple/Microsoft years back) given the market dynamics.
This is the relevant blurb from the article:
This is a major storyline to watch for the year ahead; namely, in an industry where the once impenetrable walls between media, mobile, PC and Internet are crashing down, seemingly only two companies – Apple and Google – have figured out how to ‘Think Different’ enough to play the disruptor role across all of these segments.
Given their respective mammoth ambitions, are ‘friends’ Apple/Google destined to become ‘frienemies’ ala Apple/Microsoft (circa 1990), and if so, when?
Check out the full article, ‘iPod touch: take two’ if interested:
http://thenetworkgarden.com/weblog/2008/02/ipod-touch-take.html
Regards,
Mark