Musings on Android

I am hardly alone in the thoughts that Android is spreading itself too thin (thanks to @getanis who reached the same thought as I did). It seems that between Google, the manufacturers and the telecom operators, there are way too many parties involved, each of whom have the ability to screw up the final product. In the good old iPhone world, Apple took most of the responsibility - they designed, manufactured it (through FoxConn of course, but the specifications were Apple's), tested it, ran the apps, sold it and even did a significant share of customer service. And to me, that seems like a working model.

When the flash issue came up a few months back, some thought of it as a repeat of the Mac vs PC battle that was clearly won by PC in terms of market share. Yet, I believe this round of the battle is different - it is more like Windows vs Linux with Apple taking on the monopoly part and Android taking on the Linux part. Linux was fundamentally sound - open, and with lots of technical merits and yet, it fought a hard and mostly losing battle to win over desktop users. I always felt that Linux had way too many versions of the products flying around with little or no hand holding for the vast majority of the desktop users who needed a consistent experience across machines and over a reasonable period of time. Something similar might happen to Android with every body from Google to Verizon to Amazon wanting to run market places, and somewhere along the line, the experience might get diluted. Some feel Android is too open (to the detriment of end-users) and probably too supportive of operators - the parties who have killed innovation for too long.

The more pertinent thought for me, however, is that the economics don't seem to add up in favor of Android. When Apple alone is working on one product that can sell as much as a dozen Android phone, the the number of $s it can invest in making that model perfect is always going to be more and hence the product management, engineering and testing resources will always be more available for an Apple team to build a better product vis-a-vis Android products - which will be split between Google (who isn't going to be making much money per activation), manufacturers (like Samsung or HTC who will never boast of the best product/software-engineering teams) or the operators (let's just forget them as being the gatekeepers of phone quality - the best they can do is to provide good network coverage.)

(Observers of news on Yahoo will be wise to remember the peanut butter manifesto which covered the same issue - spreading yourself too thin.)

This is not to say that Apple won't mess things up - we have already seen Antennagate - but it seems that the dice is loaded in their favor of producing one good smartphone a year that can sell more profitably and can satisfy consumers a lot more than all the Android models put together in the same year.

What do you think?