By the official count, more than 50 percent of all smartphones in the US are running Android, while 32 percent are running iOS. So Google’s mobile operating system wouldn’t seem in need of saving.
But the official count is a lie. It’s not that the industry groups that publish these numbers are deliberately misleading you. It’s that almost no one is using a true Android phone. I’d put it at under 2 percent. Google has indicated that it’s willing to be bare-knuckled in its handling of Motorola, slashing thousands of jobs to streamline the company. Now it needs to wield Motorola as a weapon and take back control of its mobile OS. Otherwise, Android apps are going to remain second-rate or warmed-over versions of what’s available in Apple’s App Store.
Every iPhone comes with iOS exactly as Steve Jobs intended, which means developers know precisely what they’re getting. But Google’s hardware partners like Samsung and HTC deploy heavily customized versions of Android onto their phones, replacing Google’s clean experience with their own user interfaces and bloatware. Given all the Android skins like Pure Breeze and Sense and TouchWiz, and all the companies that have failed to upgrade their customers’ Gingerbread devices to Honeycomb, or Honeycomb to Ice Cream Sandwich, there are dozens of different versions of Android in use right now.
So unless your phone says “Nexus” on it, you’re not running true Android. And Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus, for example, accounts for just 0.5 percent of the smartphone market. It’s a safe bet that there are more people using jailbroken iPhones than Nexus phones. If I were a Google engineer who’d poured his time and effort into the beautiful Android 4.1, aka Jelly Bean, I’d be pissed.
In what must be doubly exasperating for Google’s design team, even Microsoft has learned from Android’s difficulties, insisting on an Apple-like consistency of experience across the various Windows Phone devices. Yes, that means it’s also a more closed experience. But somewhere along the line, “open” in Android became an excuse for Google’s hardware partners to chase arbitrary distinctions in their proprietary versions of the OS rather than focusing on phones that deliver a great user experience.
I don’t say this as an Apple partisan. Far from it. I’m one of those rare people who bought a Windows Phone with his own money, and I ordered the Nexus One the day it was released, despite the $529 price tag. Only 135,000 people joined me in the first two months the phone was out. Compare that to Samsung’s Galaxy SIII, which broke 10 million in sales in June and July of this year but which runs Samsung’s own version of Android. To see Android make the leap from being the default option that comes with a service plan to actually becoming the platform that defines smartphones in the public’s imagination, Google needs to take on not just Apple but everyone in the Android hardware space too. Motorola has said it’s going to streamline its offerings. I’d push that even further. Go with a single model. And it shouldn’t have a name that reads like a license plate. Instead of the Atrix HD MB886, it should just be the Nexus Phone, with a marketing campaign that focuses on the phone, rather than Android. (When’s the last time you saw an iPhone commercial that talked about iOS?) Make it clear that this is the Google Phone.
Yes, describing this phone as “the real Google experience” will upset hardware partners like HTC and Samsung. But given the $12.5 billion it paid for Motorola, Google has kind of already suggested that it doesn’t care. Now it’s time to act like it.
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