Mobile Development SDK Cage Match

[StGabe]

From the other thread:

@Timex

I think you are selling sort some of androids innovations though. To me, android home screens are a great step beyond Apple’s list of apps. The way my android phone connects with my Google account and hooks up with everything is pretty awesome too. Some of the stuff, like being able to run apps in the background seems pretty fundamental, but iOS couldn’t do that at all until recently.

Google’s speech recognition API is pretty badass too, I must say, having used it to make a speech recognition app that let you talk to bots in a game using your phone, in a matter of maybe three hours.

That’s a whole bunch of iterative/subjective stuff except really for background apps and it’s a misconception that background apps are an “innovation”.

The very first iteration of iOS ran background tasks (a whole bunch of processes are running on there at any given time). OS’s have been multiprocess for decades and it’s not like this is “new” tech (heck, I wrote my own multi-process OS back in grad school for a class project). The only reason background tasks didn’t exist on iOS is that developers were never given access to this in the SDK. This was done by design. Apple wanted to avoid two things:

1. Users having little control over background tasks and either killing their CPU or their battery.
2. Having to put memory restrictions on specific apps.

So they waited to find what was, was in their opinion, a better solution. However if they’d wanted to just throw background processes into their SDK it probably would not have been difficult.

Whether you think that is a good idea or not, it is a design question, not a question of Google innovating more than Apple. Personally I think it’s clear that both approaches have their merits. Background tasks have been a significant issue for Android users and Google has had to throw more and more UI for users to manage processes in order to try and solve this where Apple’s solution is pretty seemless to users. Also, Android’s memory limit per application really sucks. It’s still only up to 24 or 32MB on most recent phones which is quite restrictive (that’s only 1/16th or 1/24th of the current memory on an iPhone 4). That said, if you knew what you were doing it was really nice to have background tasks and I think that Google’s decision to allow them in Android helped push Apple to get their shit together.

The only other thing there that isn’t super subjective and/or minor is voice recognition. That’s great but it’s not terribly Android specific. Really that’s just Google focusing on their core strength: data-mining. They do a great job of that. Other recent innovations from Google tend to be in the same boat like Google Goggles (Google seems to be investing more in that direction have purchased some image recognition companies of late). Google Voice is great, IMO, although it’s also not really Android specific. Google just isn’t a design-focused company that innovates by creating new user toys. They tend to take existing problems, particularly with search and/or internet data, and then come up with better ways of analysing it. The only recent innovation out of Google that I think comes close to some of what Apple is doing has been Google Wave but, unfortunately, that didn’t catch on. That’s similar because it’s one of the products where they really designed a full out user experience that didn’t exist already instead of just absorbing and iterating on existing experiences.