The Mobile OS War

[mirhagk]

Well considering this poll is 2 years old, it's hardly relevant anymore anyways.

If you want to know how irrelevant this poll is. you can see that mine is the 2nd post there and since that post (where I say I don't own a smartphone) I've had 2 android phones, 2 android tablets, and a windows phone. (I also had an iPod touch, but I think I had it then too).

[[Gandalf]]

Why would this poll be any more or less relevant now because of your outdated reply? The same major players are still at the top.

Cancer Sol, the idea was to choose one.

[Cancer Sol]

Well, I chose iOS because that's the only thing I have

[wtd]

"Android" will ultimately lose as any open source project must. The code will live on, but the name will change. The question is really not which OS will win, but which platform will win.

Let's say Samsung forks Android and then gets 50% of the market with their own fork which has its own apps that may or may not be compatible with Android proper. Is this a win or a loss for "Android" as a platform?

[wtd]

"Android" will ultimately lose as any open source project must. The code will live on, but the name will change. The question is really not which OS will win, but which platform will win.

Let's say Samsung forks Android and then gets 50% of the market with their own fork which has its own apps that may or may not be compatible with Android proper. Is this a win or a loss for "Android" as a platform?

[mirhagk]

Yeah but why would samsung do such a thing? Android is free (OEM's pay to license google products like youtube, gmail and play store), and the name is extremely valuable. Why would a company do a ton of work in order to get less apps, less users, and less money?

I also disagree that any open source project must lose. Apache has been going strong for quite a while now, so has firefox, so have many open source projects. Yes linux is split among many different distributions, all named separately, but that's partly because the "brands" are useless, and they are never used to sell devices, like android is.

If you look at market share, android is killing it, and is on the rise, meanwhile iOS has been falling in use for quite a while. Part of the reason why iOS has been in decline is because it's extreme closed-ness (like it being against the rules to make a competing rendering engine for a browser, like them wanting 30% of the cut of ANYTHING that happens on the phone, see the whole skydrive fiasco recently)

[wtd]

iOS is gaining in North America, and has been for awhile. The places where Android is dominant right now are developing countries or "emerging markets" where cheap pre-paid Android handsets are popular (think $100, no contract). Apple doesn't really have anything to compete with there yet.

The reason Samsung would do such a thing is something every good businessperson knows: if something is integral to your business, you should control it.

Samsung relies on Android right now. Google could take Android in a direction that Samsung doesn't like, and they'd have no real Plan B (Windows Phone doesn't count). Just one example: Google decides that only Motorola devices get official Google app support on the next major version of Android.

You can bet they're preparing for just such an occurrence: forking Android and building their own platform on top of it is currently the most feasible solution to being ready for this in the near future.

[Tony]

forking Android would also allow for deep integration and OS-level features that are simply not possible in apps alone. Apple has an advantage here, as they can introduce OS features, while Samsung must either push their implementations into open core Android, or fork.

[[Gandalf]]

Tony @ 2013-04-05, 1:14 am wrote:

forking Android would also allow for deep integration and OS-level features that are simply not possible in apps alone. Apple has an advantage here, as they can introduce OS features, while Samsung must either push their implementations into open core Android, or fork.

Except Samsung's Android (same goes for basically every other vendor) is already a fork of Android by that definition.

Plus, vendors can differentiate themselves by way more than just what operating system they run.

[Tony]

I was thinking along the lines of Apple's Siri. It started out as an app, but was then ported into OS for deep integration and extra utility.