Google thought that, in the long run, the plan would pay off in two ways. First, it believed that a free OS would push phone manufacturers to create better web-enabled phones, and better phones would let people spend more time on the internet. More time online means more opportunities to use Google's service and see Google ads ?ie, kerching! Android also provided a strategic benefit: if the manufacturers adopted Google's OS, the search company would retain some influence on the devices people used to get its services. If it weren't for Android, Google's customers would have been using devices controlled by Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, or RIM, all of which had incentives to limit Google's reach. Android lets Google control its own destiny.
The strategy worked brilliantly. Android is now the world's most popular mobile operating system. It's unclear if Google makes much money from Android directly ? by some estimates, Google makes as much from ads on Apple's iOS devices as it does on Android machines. But there's no question that Android has helped lower the prices of smartphones across the globe, which can only help Google's ad business. It's hard to call Android anything other than a resounding success.
Well, except for one small thing: most Android phones are rubbish. As part of a new year's resolution, I promised to trade in my beloved iPhone 5 for an Android phone sometime in 2013. I reasoned that, as a tech writer, I should spend more time with the world's most popular operating system. Phone companies have regularly sent me Android phones to test in the past, but I'd never given most of them more than a passing look ? I'd open them up, turn them on, get aggravated by their bad keyboards or poor touchscreens or frustrating add-on software, and immediately package them up and send them back.
This shouldn't be surprising ? most Android phones are very cheap, and you get what you pay for. Over the past few months, though, I've been testing two of the most expensive, most advanced Android phones on the market, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One.
Altogether, I experienced the best and worst of Android ? and I saw, up close, Android's basic problem. I'd sum it up as follows. Google makes a fine mobile operating system. Some phone manufacturers make attractive, powerful Android handsets. These phones have the potential to be really wonderful machines, even as great as Apple's flagship phone. But then, at the last second, the manufacturers and the mobile phone operators snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. They ruined the phones' potential with unnecessary features and apps that lowered the battery life, spoilt the home screens, and made everything you wanted to do extra annoying.
This is one of the most important advantages Apple has over Android devices. When you buy an iPhone, it works exactly as Apple intended; it's never adulterated by "features" that the company didn't approve. But when you buy an Android phone, even a really great one, you're not getting the device that Google's designers had in mind when they created the OS. You're not even getting the device that the phone manufacturer ? Samsung and HTC, in this case ? had in mind. Instead, you're getting a bastardised version, a phone replete with software that has been altered by many players along the way, usually in a clumsy, money-grubbing fashion.
I noticed this immediately when I first turned on the Sprint-powered HTC One and Galaxy S4. When you run an iPhone for the first time, you go through just a handful of steps to get up and running: choose a language, add a Wi-Fi network, and log in to your Apple account. The same is true of the Google editions of the One and S4?just a few prompts and you're good to go. But not the carrier versions. I had to sit through more than half a dozen screens. I was pushed to sign in to several social-networking accounts. I had to create accounts with HTC or Samsung's own services.
Then, when I thought I was at last ready to start using my phone, another prompt came on the screen to let me know that Sprint was installing some software of its own. After another five minutes, my phone was finally ready to use ? but when I browsed through the menus, there was a whole bunch of software that I didn't need, including apps for Yahoo, Amazon, a Sprint app for watching television, and a WhitePages app. Why these apps specifically? Not because Sprint believes that you'll find them really helpful, but instead because it received a promotional fee. Congratulations on your new phone ? now look at all the ads.
You might not consider these pre-loaded apps such a big deal. We're all used to getting rubbish on new PCs; this is the same story, just on phones, and it's not such a big hassle to delete everything you don't need. But you shouldn't have to delete stuff just to get your phone looking like you want it. Plus, I suspect that many users probably don't even know how to delete these apps, so they just sit there, clogging up the home screen.
This isn't the worst thing about Android phones, though. It's the "skins" ? the modifications that phone companies make to Android's most basic features, including the dialling app, contacts, email, the calendar, the notification system, and the layout of the home screen. If you get the Play edition of these phones, you'll see Google's version of each of these apps, and you'll come away impressed by Google's tasteful, restrained, utilitarian design sense. But if, like most people, you get your phone for ?199 from a mobile phone operator, you'll find everything in it is a frightful mess.
Google's dialling app, for instance, uses a minimalist palette and big, readable, sans-serif numbers. Samsung's is a garish shock of mismatched colours, lines, and shadows. It's not just hideous but less functional. In the contacts pane, Google's dialler smartly displays people's names and numbers; you can dial just by touching the number. In Samsung's dialler, you've got to tap a contact's name, which brings up a new screen, which you've got to tap again to make a phone call. Meanwhile, if you click on a number in the call log, Samsung's dialler doesn't do the obvious thing and dial the number ? instead, it shows you another screen, and to dial the number you've to press the green phone icon, which isn't immediately obvious.
There are lots of annoying nuisances like this one, in which Samsung or HTC took Google's easy-to-use design and monkeyed with it for no good reason. Together, all these little bugs add up to a frustrating experience. In most cases, you can fix the problem; you can replace Samsung or HTC's apps with Google's version, you can remove the unnecessary stuff from your home screen, you can opt-out of flashy but terrible gimmicky features. But doing so is too much of a hassle for people who just want a phone that works right out of the box. If that's what you want, you've got two options. You can pay full price for a Play edition Android device. Or you can buy an iPhone.
Because I'm eligible for an upgrade with my carrier, I'd rather not pay full price for a Play edition Android. So, new year's resolution be damned, I'm sticking with Apple.
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