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Android is the Global iPhone, and the next PC
The Theory
In July of 2005, Google acquired a start-up company called Android. That was the summer they saw ten years into the future, created a new market, and effectively obsoleted the iPhone and anything else Apple could possibly come up with.
Cell-phone hardware can be copied and resold on the black market, and has been. For Google, hardware concerns are remote. For them, the cell phone is simply a platform for accessing Google services, and a mechanism for sending and receiving data, each bit of which that passes through Google making Google services more valuable. It is a connection between a Google service and a user, joining the physical and virtual.
The world-wide cellular network is Google’s next frontier, and they’re starting with a single phone, an operating system, and a development environment.
The Apple iPhone - Wonderful, But Regionally Impaired
The iPhone represents a combination of iterative, carefully calculated marketing strategies which themselves are, even for a company as universally recognized as Apple, remarkable. Hardware-wise, the iPhone itself is perhaps Apple’s most convincing argument to date for tight hardware/software integration. It’s a model of Apple’s trademark combination: high-quality hardware running advanced, regulated software.
Within the scope of the mobile phone market, among middle-class people in the Western hemisphere, the iPhone is legitimately revolutionary. And in that market, the iPhone will always have a share. But the western phone market doesn’t matter a whole lot. Google has looked beyond the horizon, into the rest of the world, where there are billions of potential consumers - all on shabby phones running even shabbier software. The real market is the untapped IT battleground of the developing world, where cell coverage represents the next, and often only, level of communication above the spoken word and print.
Hardware Doesn’t Really Matter
The iPhone, and other “smart phones” like it, are constructed using parts fabricated, for the most part, in developing countries. There’s not really a secret as to how these things were put together. Over time, whatever NDAs or pacts Apple, Nokia, and Blackberry had with their manufacturers, their hardware angles become less of an asset as the rest of the market takes apart, studies, and builds for cheaper what they came up with first. In the weeks and months following the iPhone’s initial release, countless Chinese iPhone knock-offs could be found on the Internet.
I’ve seen some of these phones, and I was amazed by the level of technological achievement these dual-SIM, quad-band, touchscreen devices represented. The quality of construction and parts varied widely; but generally, the average sub-$100 Chinese smart phone has some sort of flash expansion, built-in MP3/MPEG decoders, a low-grade VGA camera, and an ARM processor. As a rule, the software on them always sucks. iPhone clones don’t actually run Apple’s pared-down OS X; they run proprietary, rudimentary firmware that doesn’t come close to being a real operating system.
An Aside: The Moral of the OLPC
My laptop is a pretty, complex piece of hardware, the utility of which is increased exponentially when I network it somehow. People who use computers the way I do, without thinking enough about why people elsewhere in the world use and buy electronics the way they do, came up with this thing called the OLPC.
It’s an ambitious hardware project, but something of a moot endeavour when cell phones are selling themselves, and governments don’t have to buy them. The value of the cell phone is universally understood, and it has genuine utility. The OLPC does not. The OLPC is not very simple, and doesn’t depend on or extend any social, technological, or economic systems or precedents.
The OLPC represents the insight that the developing world needs an affordable, open computing platform, and is a noble thing, but a huge waste of money. The cell phone, on the other hand, is an incredible software “in” and has an established hardware precedent.
Google’s Plan
In developed countries, most phones will run Android anyhow. I think that Google will open their software to no-name manufacturers, and aggressively invest in cellular networks and datacenters in developing countries. I also think Google will begin to roll out localized services depending on those phones, networks, and datacenters.
The OLPC of an affordable networked computer will be realized, but its name will be cell phone. I think there will be phones and SDKs and learning tools on Android for students and children; in fact, I think a really wide range of software will emerge, a range so wide it’s hard to imagine or predict specifics.
And, Google will get richer; as the inventor of a market, they’ll retain total control, and add value to the services they provide through phone networks by collecting, indexing, and transforming data - just like they’ve done with the Web.
Developers
As a software developer, I see a big market opening up - localized applications for Android. Much of the hype surrounding Android is focused on copying iPhone functionality. I think a lot of phone developers might be going down that same path.
If there’s money to be made developing applications for Android, I think it’s in non-English language, localized applications. Or, software that helps non-English speaking people use English-language software.
Don’t Be Evil?
There’s money to be made. Android might also sort of deliver on the dream of the OLPC; everyone in the world may have access to an open, networked computer. Really though, if I’m right, there’s no way one entity having control over basically all world-wide communication is a good thing. Or maybe I’m ending on a dour note for no reason? Having the powerful searching and communication tools that Google affords, with its deep pockets and hordes of genius programmers and engineers, might really improve everyone’s quality of life…
