Android: My Perspective
After using my new Android phone for two weeks now, I have some thoughts.
First, Android is an OS that gives you a lot of power in the most user-friendly way it can. Unlike iOS, however, when faced with a tradeoff between flexibility and user experience, Android prefers flexibility. For instance:
The Android homescreen supports widgets. They’re not bad widgets, of course, but some of them can be ugly and detract from the look of the phone. If you don’t have good design sense, you can make your phone look ugly. iOS doesn’t give you the ability to make your phone ugly. I actually prefer Android’s stance on this, because I believe that people who don’t have design sense won’t be affected by an ugly phone. For those who do, you can do a lot more while maintaining a great experience.
Multitasking is more powerful on Android. Yes, iOS has multitasking, but only in limited circumstances. The best example is Instapaper - though the Instapaper app on iOS cannot pull items added outside the app, the Android knockoff apps have no issues doing so. The tradeoff is if you get too greedy with your syncing & notification settings, you can end up with a 12-minute battery life.
Many included OS elements can be swapped out for custom ones. You can have the stock launcher, or even the HTC Sense launcher, replaced with third-party launchers like LauncherPro, and the same with keyboards. The benefit of this is that if you can find an implementation that works better for you, you can get it and have a great, unique experience, but if the stock keyboard is unsatisfactory you have to do the work.
Second, the quality of Android apps are inconsistent, but individual apps can be great. If you distinguish between apps and games, the situation is more clear: apps, which are typically popular services, are typically very good. Apps like Rdio and TweetDeck are better on Android than they are on iOS. Twitter and Facebook are almost as good as the iOS implementations (though TweetDeck is superior to both - nothing like its desktop counterpart). Games, on the other hand: Angry Birds, or go to hell. The gaming landscape is much more sparse than I had expected. There are games, but they usually feel cheap. Angry Birds is the stunning exception to the rule, though. The good news is that emulators are available straight from the Market, which brings me to my next point.
Third, though rooting your phone gives you lots of power, there’s nothing you really need it for unless you need Wifi tethering for free. USB tethering apps are available straight from the market, emulators come straight from the market, and UI customization apps are available freely as well. The best reason for rooting your phone is nuking carrier customizations. On my Incredible, the carrier/manufacturer customizations aren’t very bad, and some are genuine improvements. If I was on one of the Bing-locked Samsung phones, though, I would have rooted and wiped long ago.
Fourth, it has Flash. I don’t like Flash, and I feel that I shouldn’t need Flash, but I’m starting to suspect that many videos that work fine on iOS don’t work on Android, for no good reason. So, I have to fall back to Flash on occasion. The good news is that there’s a click-to-Flash equivalent feature included, though not enabled by default. It seems to perform adequately, as well. I’m not happy that I’m having HTML5 issues, though. I’ll have to do more research to figure out what the culprit is, though: for all I know, it’s device detection or Flash detection.
Fifth on my list is UI inconsistencies. Particularly with having HTC Sense on my phone, applications simply don’t have a consistent look and feel. On the whole, the UI situation is like Windows: conventions are followed only when convenient, making the conventions largely useless. It’s not a horrible situation, and most apps do have at least some commonality to them, but every app is usually different. It’s a double-edged sword, of course, as it gives lots of freedom for UI designers to experiment and create a truly novel & effective experience - which will also be necessary because the learning curve is high enough already due to the lack of conventions.
Finally, there’s the superior notification system. iOS’s notification system is, uncharacteristically for Apple, half-baked and annoying. Android’s is anything but. You never get interrupted by a notification, and you can select a specific, custom sound for each app notification. (They all sound similar, though, which has been driving me crazy for the past couple weeks.) For emails I even get the notification LED that BlackBerry users are supposedly addicted to.
I’m sure I just scratched the surface of the differences - these are fundamentally different platforms. I am growing pretty fond of my Android phone, though. The issue I see with it is for people who aren’t me: if you don’t understand the pitfalls that come with background programs, or widgets, or other not-completely-harmless features, then Android can become a confusing OS to use, particularly compared to iOS. Not difficult to use, but they wouldn’t understand why the battery life has gotten worse, not knowing that background syncing can be expensive. They would most likely blame the phone.
That right there is Android’s greatest weakness: it’s more rewarding for power-users than average users. The iPhone is the opposite of that. Android’s UI inconsistencies are a genuine downside, but so are notifications on iOS. Both of them can realistically be fixed, however (though the Android issues are more complex).
So, the question is, do I wish I had an iPhone instead? To me, the difference between the two OS’s really does come down to preference, at least for the time being, and that difference is outweighed by hardware and network factors. In my case, the network won out. I would prefer an iPhone, but only by a slim, slim margin, and only because it has wonderful hardware and its software issues can be partially corrected with a jailbreak. Android is definitely a strong competitor to iOS and worth considering when you get your next phone.
