Notice in all this, Google is never to blame.
This is a fundamental difference between Google and Apple, and the main reason why I still think Android will remain a scattered, less popular platform than the iPhone for years to come. Apple puts the responsibility for great user experience on itself and on its developers. The only people who suffer from this approach are geek users who don’t care whether or not they have to spend hours configuring their phones right just to get a day’s use out of the battery, and lesser developers who don’t want to learn how to code more efficiently.
Users are oblivious to what goes on behind the scenes; they just know they love their iPhones, because they work. Good developers are happier here, too, because they are rewarded for their good coding practices and aren’t forced to compete in a sea of hacks.
Google, on the other hand, believes in the wild west, where your user experience depends on how much you want to research how to use the products properly. Google still doesn’t get that most users, even power users like myself, would rather spend their time actually using the phone than learning how to use it. Google also doesn’t seem to get that if you let developers do whatever they want, they will, and users will suffer for it.
I just don’t see how Google breaks through to mainstream users with this approach. Microsoft got away with it because there was no viable alternative at the time. Flooding the market with dozens of models that are incompatible with each other might look good on a spreadsheet, but it’s not a good way to build a long-lasting platform. Once Android kills off Microsoft’s mobile efforts, I just don’t see where the growth is going to come from. Not with this sort of attitude from its leadership.
