iOS Vs. Android – Does It Really Matter?
By Wayne Maruna
During Hurricane Florence, 100% of New Bern’s electrical customers lost power. Along with that went cable and internet and for most people, land-line phones as well. Fortunately, cellular towers remained intact, so people communicated via smart phones. For me, that meant relying on my little iPhone SE with its 4” diagonal screen and even smaller virtual keyboard. The SE, one of the last of the small format smart phones, is great for carrying around with its light weight and small size, but admittedly it leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to doing much more than talking or listening to music. In its recent Sept. 2018 phone product launch announcement, Apple did not advertise the fact that it had removed the SE from its phone offerings.
I admit I found myself fat fingering the small virtual keyboard a lot when emailing or texting, and I had to make sure to proofread everything before clicking on send. It made me rethink my decision of a couple of years ago to move from the large Samsung S5 to the small iPhone SE.
As I considered the thought of a new phone, I kept going back to the iPhone X, not because I wanted one, but because I could not understand how anyone would be willing to spend a thousand bucks on a cell phone. Granted, it’s not just a phone, it’s a mini computer as well, but so are all smart phones. Numbers tossed around on the web tend to point to a Bloomberg report that estimates the cost of materials in a 64GB iPhone X at around $370, which excludes the costs of assembly, marketing, distribution, and the allocation of R&D and operating system development. So while the X likely has a fat margin, it may not be as outrageous as one might think.
The press is certainly stuck on high-end ‘flagship’ phones, whether from Apple’s primary rival Samsung or from competitors like LG, Motorola, Google, HTC, or many others. Several of those competitor flagship phones have similarly high prices. Samsung’s Note 9 ‘phablet’ sells for $980 while their Galaxy 9+ goes for $740. The Google Pixel 2 costs $759 and the LG G7 costs $737. (All prices are as of late September on Amazon.) In its most recent product roll-out, Apple announced the 5.8” iPhone XS and the whopping 6.5” XS Max, for which you can spend as much as $1,449 for the top version. I’m sure people will line up to buy them, but that’s crazy talk in my book.
September 23rd, 2018 marked the tenth anniversary of the first phone running the Android operating system, the HTC Dream, sold in the US as the T-Mobile G1. This was about a year after the release of the original iPhone. Today’s iPhone remains a closed, integrated system. Apple designs and makes the hardware as well as the ‘iOS’ operating system. You can’t buy an iPhone without iOS, and you can’t buy a phone with iOS and non-Apple hardware. Android, on the other hand, has been ‘open source’ since its creation by Andy Rubin (it was later sold to Google.) Anyone can build a cell phone and use Android as its operating system. That’s its charm, and that’s its curse. Manufacturers are free to customize the system within limits, so when Android gets an update, in most cases it can’t roll out quickly to all Android phones in the user community because the manufacturers have to first tweak the updates to fit their customization – and sometimes they just don’t bother to send out an update. The only two phones I know of that get next-day rollouts of updated Android releases are the Google Pixel line and a little known company called Essential, a company led by Android’s creator, Andy Rubin.
I found an Essential PH-1 phone on sale on Amazon for $310 (since increased to $330 but the price fluctuates daily, and the list price on Essential.com is $499.) This is Essential’s only model, and frankly the company has been rumored to be looking for an acquirer. But this $310 phone is, to my way of thinking, equivalent to most other companies’ flagship phones. I won’t delve into the specs here, but if you’re curious you can do the research at www.essential.com. After playing with this phone for several days, I’m even more convinced that there is no reason to spend more on a phone, though I understand that just like some people buy vehicles for the badge on the back, so too with phones.
I also don’t find a whole lot of difference between iOS and Android for the typical consumer. You can make calls, read and send emails and texts, scour the internet, play music, and take photos. I will say that camera quality is a differentiator between phones, though I think less so between operating systems. If you’re particular about phone cameras, look into the Huawei P20 Pro with its Leica 40MP camera! Anyway, in comparing the SE and the Essential phones, I can bounce between iOS and Android without much of a thought at all.
While there are conflicting data floating around the internet (if you can imagine that), I’ve read that Android has around 85% world market share, with Apple’s iOS accounting for most of the balance (source IDC). In the US, the share is significantly different, with Android around 54.5% and iOS at 44.5%, leaving Microsoft and Blackberry to battle for that last 1% (source Statista). The difference in market share is likely due to price, as consumers in less wealthy nations lean toward offerings from a myriad of Android phone brands (e.g. Samsung, LG, Motorola, Sony, HTC, Huawei, Google Pixel, Essential, OnePlus, Honor, Doogee, BLU, Xiaomi, and Racer to name a few) as many can be found as low as under $100. For someone who just wants to talk and maybe text and take the occasional low-resolution photo, the cost of entry can be quite low. You also don't have to buy from a carrier (Verizon, AT&T, etc.). You can buy a phone 'unlocked' and take it to whatever carrier you choose and get what is called a SIM card (Subscriber Identity Module) installed to link you into their service. Many new phones sold today are capable of being used on both CDMA networks (Verizon, Sprint) or GSM networks (AT&T, T-Mobile), though many phones are sold as GSM only, so know your specs before buying.