The Android Problem – Will the Nexus One Help or Hurt?
It won’t be long now before all of the speculation over rumors of Google’s Nexus One can be put to rest. Rumors have run from a $199 unsubsidized direct sell phone from Google to the now most widely accepted rumor of $530 sold directly by Google with a $180 price tag when bought through T-Mobile with a 2 year contract.
There aren’t much for rumors on the phone’s abilities though. Plenty of videos have surfaced showing just what the UI will look like. The new Android 2.1 ROM has already been ported to the Droid and runs much faster than the 2.0 that came on the device to begin with.
Everything about this phone says wow! But there is a big BUT coming. A trend I have noticed is a very fractured app store. Apps that run on one phone don’t seem to run on another. There are a lot of issues with trying to support an app on an operating system that has seen 6 major OS revisions in a little over a year (1.0, 1.1, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1). People are upset with developers because the app the developer wrote for 1.1, doesn’t work properly on 1.5, and the app written for 1.5 doesn’t work properly on 2.0. We can go on all day. Unfortunately, it isn’t always just the difference between OS’s. It can also be differences between phone manufacturers. An app may work great on one phone but not so well on another of the same OS version. I have a couple of widgets that seem to work one day and then not at all the next (on the same phone)!
So far, Apple has done a pretty decent job of keeping legacy hardware up-to-date at the time of a new OS update. It is not forced on the user, but it is easy to do during the sync process with iTunes. Google doesn’t have a PC counterpart to hook up to your phone. Average Android users have relied on over the air (OTA) updates from their carriers to get the latest version of the OS. iPhone users update their phones at their own discretion. A lot of this has to do with the fact that phones sold through the carriers are typically modified versions of the operating system. Certain features are disabled and controlled by the carrier. When an update to the OS happens, the carrier or the handset maker have to merge in the updates on their own. This can be slow and costly. It just isn’t a world the carriers play well in.
I worked on a project with one of the major US carriers where they were long down the road to creating a very impressive integrated UI for an android phone before version 1.1 of the OS had even come out. They weren’t even planning on releasing the modified version of the OS until 2010 on an undetermined phone. When I asked one of the designers if she knew what kind of a nightmare it would be to maintain that kind of a thing, she responded that it just didn’t matter. That is the mentality of the carriers. They tried to create a flagship phone at such an unbelievable expense to only have HTC come along and effectively deliver a better product with the Sense UI in far less time. Carriers should stay out of modifying smart phone core operating systems and just stick to add-on apps. Carriers move glacially…Google does not.
So along comes the Nexus One from Google. This will be a Google branded phone, so it should easily take updates to the OS when new updates are available. It will basically be like one of the developer phones that I use for android development. I look forward to seeing how those updates are going to be distributed to normal people with limited technical ability. I really want one of these things. We’ll see how well Google gets me going on January 5th. I may just not be able to resist. I do need a 2.1 phone for development purposes after all…
This is inspiring I think I will start a blog myself one day in italian of course. Great post, grazie.