August 17, 2009, 5:24 PM — Like all right-thinking people, I want want Android to be awesome, I really do. If it were just plain better than my iPhone, that would be great (no more AT&T!). More likely, it could be awesome in different ways. After all, it's got free cloud-based sync, an open marketplace, background apps, multiple carriers, and so on. I don't know if I'd switch for those specific things, but even if I didn't, other people with different needs surely would, provided the overall experience was a good one. And that would put some pressure on Apple to make the iPhone even better. Everybody wins!
Except that nobody really likes Android. It's not awful, of course, just full of little annoyances. But if there's one thing that Apple understands better than just about anyone, it's that little annoyances matter. They're the difference between loving a device and merely putting up with it until you can find an excuse to dump it. People who put up with their phone don't line up by the hundreds for new releases. They don't recommend it to their friends. They might develop for it, especially if it's an easy move from something they know (which Android apparently is not, despite its Linux underpinnings) and if it lets them escape the vagaries of the App Store (which it does), but not if there are no users for their apps.
Ah, but the Android experience will get better over time, you say. Google has a whole slew of pastry-themed updates in the works (donut, eclair, and flan), and they'll be better! Setting aside for a moment the problems with the ship-some-mediocre-stuff-that-more-or-less-works-and-fix-it-in-a-later-release development model, there's now word that T-Mobile's G1, the original Android phone that's less than a year old, won't be receiving any substantial OS updates past the current version. Why? Because it has a puny amount of on-board storage, and there's not enough room for new versions of Android.
This is disappointing for G1 owners, of course. But it's bad for the rest of us, too. You only ship a phone that can't be updated if you're thinking of it as a conventional cell phone, the kind that customers get for free with a contract and throw out, unchanged, in a couple of years when they're entitled to another (free) one. This might be a good way to get people to upgrade ("maybe the new version will suck less!"), but it doesn't do anything to surprise and delight them in the interim. I want to be surprised and delighted, and if the Android people aren't even trying to do that, I don't think Apple has much to worry about.
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