Google: Android will outsell iPhone, we still love ya Steve

Watching Google tiptoe around its relationship with Apple as it rolls out Android is one of the most enjoyable aspects of watching the industry these days. This is perfectly illustrated in the words of Rich Miner, group manager for Google's mobile platforms, who said, "there's a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone." A truthful statement in all likelihood assuming that the OS is robust upon its global release later this year and available on handsets from HTC, Samsung, Motorola, and LG as expected. Miner then took a few shots at the iPhone SDK saying, "There are things I saw people doing with the first version of the Android SDK that it seems like you can't do with the iPhone at least at the moment." He then noted that the SDK had been downloaded 750,000 times (compared to Apple's 100k in 4 days) as of February. Naturally, he then applied a thick, brown coat of public relations salve saying, "[If I were a developer] I'd certainly be looking at the iPhone, and if you believe there will be lots of Android phones out there, as we do, I'd be developing for both platforms." Kumbaya my BossEricSchmidtSitsOnTheAppleBoard, kumabaya...

[Akshay @ Mar 14th 2008 5:07AM]

If it has to take on the iPhone, it needs to have a good UI. And thats exactly the best part of Android, the open-ness. There will be thousands of different GUIs for users to choose from, and as seen before, it has the potential to be awesome. Whatever its current state is now, the only thing that matters is that it can run even on slow processors. The apps and programs will be made by the thousands of people using it. Android has IMMENSE POTENTIAL to take on anything. And obviously it will outsell iPhone, its a free platform compared to the iPhone which is a friggin phone.

[tekdroid @ Mar 14th 2008 6:18AM]

to be fair, lots of things that haven't been released have lots of potential.

It's a case of wait and see with Android. I think it's getting a lot of hype but until the products hit the retail channels, I will reserve judgement. Late this year for the first products, they say.

Plus a few years to mature, I say. Google has the cash to do something good, but whether they do or not is up in the air.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(mobile_phone_platform)

Right now, it's (deservedly or not) lots of hype, little substance.

[Jagannath A @ Mar 14th 2008 7:13AM]

you know when people are not that interested in a topic... when the first comment is a frigging paragraph ;)

[Flashpoint @ Mar 14th 2008 8:07AM]

It isn't that hard to outsell the iphone.

All you need is a decent phone offered in both CDMA and GSM. How about Motorola Razr? That's success right there.

[Wayne Smallman @ Mar 14th 2008 9:03AM]

"There will be thousands of different GUIs for users to choose from,..."

Rarely is that a plus point.

Here I'm thinking of Gnome versus KDE.

If there isn't a sound, base UI in place, then all of Google's efforts are largely self-defeating...

[E71 @ Mar 14th 2008 9:36AM]

I for one, never loved Steve...

[OneLove @ Mar 14th 2008 11:09AM]

The iphone is now a teenager and android is still an infant. There is a long road and many revisions to go.

[gkoenig @ Mar 14th 2008 12:57PM]

If it has to take on the iPhone, it needs to have a good UI. And thats exactly the best part of Android, the open-ness. There will be thousands of different GUIs for users to choose from,

There is your problem right there...

The entire reason Apple products are so successful is because Apple imposes very rigid guidelines on how stuff works. Geeky folks lambast the company for being so closed and for their tight control, but it is Apple's rigidity that allows them to make products that have a reputation for ease of use and reliability.

Android will be a design by committee product with a bunch of bozo executives from clueless companies like Motorola and HTC all trying to pull the platform in whatever hot technical direction they read about in an in-flight magazine.

Remember - for all of Google's hype, they have only truly succeeded in dominating one bit of the market (search). Some of their other products are strong, but the vast majority of their product lineup is half baked beta ware. Apple has a stream of knock out products on the books delivered by the current team.

[macona @ Mar 14th 2008 3:24PM]

@OneLove

Android is not an infant, it is still pre-natal. Has not even been born.

Evaluating Android now is literally counting your chicks before they have hatched.

[Brian @ Mar 14th 2008 7:04PM]

How many successful and stable open source apps are there? And how long did the stable ones take to become stable? One of the few successful, well known ones I can think of is Firefox. Even at that, there are MANY people whose never heard of it. Failures? Open office. It has been in development FOREVER and 99.99% of people who KNOWS of Open Office still use MS Word.

You gotta remember, most people can't unlock an iphone even w/ a 3 step guide. Your sisters, girlfriends, parents, and business friends won't know how to upgrade this Android thing-of-a-jigga.

But if Android ever does succeed, its going to take more a few years. By then, many things would have changed. Bottom line is, most people would like to just use their phone, not constantly tinker with it.

[Sam Winter @ Mar 15th 2008 4:38PM]

@Brian
You are actually questioning the success of any open source applications?? You have to be kidding me? Open source as a concept has been incredibly successful, From operating systems to reusable software libraries and components, to end user software.

- Linux and Apache run 50% of all web servers on the internet.
- Firefox/Thunderbird have a significant share of the market
- open source is very popular in software/web development, think: LAMP, Eclipse, GCC, PHP, Perl, TCL/TK, Python, Ruby, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SqlLite, Subversion, Mono,
and just about every web application framework/app server/ content managements system (Zope, DJango, Zoop, Drupal, DNN, Jboss, etc) known to man.

- open source tool and utilities are used extensively. Some examples include freeNas, Samba, RealVNC, lighttpd, Squid, Clamwin, TrueCrypt, Wireshark, Asterisk, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Putty, STunnel, QEMU, Snort, CygWin, NMap, Ethereal etc etc.

- Many, if not the majority of sucessful commerical applications not only use some form of open source software components in their software, but also use open source IDEs, compilers, and debuggers to create it in the first place.

- Linux as well as BSD variants are very popular in high reliability servers and embedded systems.

- open source is also very widespread in the scientific world, including molecular biology and DNA research, computational and analytical chemistry, astrophysics and astronomy, applied mathematics and engineering, and other areas benefiting from computational models and simulation.

- open source is also very popular in end-user apps such as, Abiword, Open Office, Scribus, Audacity, SongBird, GIMP, Blender,Dia, Xara, Paint.net, Inkscape
Miro, Adium, Pidgin, Xvid, VLC player, MythTV, VirtualDub, AviSynth, ImageMagick, POV-Ray Azureus, and a million other apps.

[Generic @ Mar 14th 2008 5:08AM]

"Kumbaya my BossEricSchmidtSitsOnTheAppleBoard, kumabaya..."

my first laugh today :)

[CB17 @ Mar 14th 2008 5:30AM]

You have to be pretty stupid to compare Android to the iPhone. One's a piece of FREE software and one's a piece of hardware.

Now if you want to compare Android to Windows Mobile or Symbian... I ain't stoppin' ya. Have at it. But from Google's point of view, all THEY have to do is compete with Microsoft/Nokia to make sure their OS gets on more phones then the other 2. It's up to the manufacturers to do the iPhone comparing.

[virgoRV @ Mar 14th 2008 11:51AM]

Dude, FYI Apple is both a software and a Hardware company...

[Eugenia Loli-Queru @ Mar 14th 2008 5:35AM]

The iPhone SDK has restrictions in its license that make many kinds of applications just not possible to be developed and accepted by Apple. I actually blogged about this in great detail 4 days ago: http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2008/03/09/the-iphone-sdk/
The Android SDK on the other hand does not have such restrictions, but instead the OS itself seems to be robust enough to ensure security.

[ericdano @ Mar 14th 2008 11:39AM]

So? And who says that when Android, whenever it is launched, won't have such restrictions?

[Eugenia Loli-Queru @ Mar 14th 2008 4:49PM]

It won't have such restrictions, because it's an open platform. The iPhone is not. Do some research.

[Boris @ Mar 14th 2008 5:39AM]

"we still love ya Steve"

"Uh, duh" coming from Engadget?

[Nate @ Mar 14th 2008 8:39AM]

lol ... yeah, we get it!

[wizzle @ Mar 14th 2008 11:08AM]

dude, he wasn't speaking for himself in the title; he was personifying google.

was that not perfectly clear from reading the article?

[mymaclife @ Mar 14th 2008 6:30AM]

@ CB17
How were you proposing to stop people comparing the Iphone with Android?

[bob @ Mar 14th 2008 7:18AM]

not one thing accept being open has impressed me about android yet, it really looks like a big disappointment.

[Ty @ Mar 14th 2008 6:37AM]

The fact that it IS so unrestricted and diverse will ultimately be its downfall.

As much as numbskulls bitch about the iPhone's controlled environment - Apple know what they are doing. This environment is there for several reasons. The iPhone is going to be the platform of the future.

The IQ level around here is such that there is no point in me trying to explain this in less than biblical length without having to use words of more than one syllable.

I will repost this in 2 years or so.

[technophobe @ Mar 14th 2008 7:03AM]

"Apple is better than any alternatives, and if you don't understand that it's because you are inferior and stupid"

[Surur @ Mar 14th 2008 7:07AM]

So in short, Apple makes a phone for stupid people, but the people here are too stupid to realize it, and you think they are too stupid to be explained why they are too stupid to run a modern smartphone.

Superiority complex much?

[KarlW @ Mar 14th 2008 8:30AM]

I happen to agree with this person. The restrictions are mostly good.

Having a million interfaces for one platform (see 1st comment) is not something I want. That's what gives you the clumsy UI Linux has.

Same goes for applications on Windows - make it too open, and things _will_ go wrong. That's simply not appropriate for a mobile platform.

[Dave B @ Mar 14th 2008 8:42AM]

@Sursur

iPhone's for stupid people eh? Dumbed down? Because you can tinker with an OS clearly makes you 'smart' I guess. Perhaps you can try designing a poster or a catalog, perhaps you'll know everything there is to know about CMYK, overprinting, crop marks, character styles, paragraph styles, leading, tracking, kerning, etc. etc. Maybe you're seeing my point, but here goes…

Apple DESIGNED an OS that allows it to be user-friendly and easy to use for the mass audience. Why? Because that's what design means, to create clear layouts and systems that communicate effectively to their audience. Guess I should mention I have a BFA in graphic design.

My point is this, most people could care less about all the tinkering they can do in an OS, because they are too busy USING it to communicate with their companies or clients or to find out when little Timmy's soccer game is.

Putting Android in the hand of developers on an open platform is wonderful, but it begs to question whether those developer will create effective and clear user interfaces. Hopefully they will work with a team of UI designers and visual designers to work out how the user will interact with it, otherwise it's just another wasted OS. Oh, and of course it'll sell a lot, because it has a massive amount of phone companies on board.

[Craig @ Mar 14th 2008 8:52AM]

Some Nobel Laureate economists once thought up something called "network externalities," meaning that the more people there are using something, the exponentially more useful it becomes to each individual user. Any operating system benefits from this by virtue of the developer community; the more users, the more developers want to code for that platform, which creates more value and more people adopt it...and this cycles around to grow the platform (I mean, do you think Windows became the dominant OS on its /technical/ merits??). The openness of Android and the ubiquity and cheapness of compatible hardware will ultimately secure its place as the dominant handheld platform...at least for a while.

So, to sum up, you're wrong.

[Andir3.0 @ Mar 14th 2008 9:35AM]

"Putting Android in the hand of developers on an open platform is wonderful, but it begs to question whether those developer will create effective and clear user interfaces"

The market will decide that. Don't like the interface? Too clumsy? Don't buy it.

[John @ Mar 14th 2008 6:38AM]

Anyone know when this going to be available?

[Hawkmankt @ Mar 14th 2008 6:46AM]

I would have to say that you are smoking crack to think that this OS (or anything with the OS on it) will outsell the iPhone.

First off, like noted above, I wanna point out it's not a phone but merely an OS.

Second, have you ever seen hype like there is around the iPhone for anything? Maybe the Razr as far as cells go.

Third, Apple has marketing down to a science. Their commercials and ads are amazing. You cannot deny that.

[Surur @ Mar 14th 2008 7:04AM]

I hope you know that HTC sold more phones with WM on them in the same time Apple sold its 4 million iPhones, and that HTC is making an Android phone.

Apple likes high margins. They are not ever going to compete for the meat of cellphone market, except in USA where people prefer dumbed down over cheap.

[Chris @ Mar 14th 2008 7:18AM]

Whether this OS appears on more phones than OS X mobile depends on what hardware is required. If its requirements are similar to Windows Mobile then I don't think it will outsell the iphone. The fact that its free and they are pushing so hard to get developer support will certainly help it though. What the iPhone has going for it is that programs designed for it will also work on iPods. As time goes on and the prices on the iPod Touch are reduced, the potential market for developers will expand rapidly. You won't see Google mention this fact.

[Darkest Daze @ Mar 14th 2008 7:24AM]

Would you be happier if they said that Android will outsell OSX mobile? Either way they're saying that Android will outsell the iPhone since Apple won't let anyone else use their mobile OS.

[CB17 @ Mar 14th 2008 4:01PM]

@Darkest Daze

You're missing the point. The iPhone is just ONE phone, but Android can be installed on thousands of devices of different shapes and sizes. I'm NOT saying that we the consumer can't compare Android devices to the iPhone. But clearly when you're talking about android vs. iPhone in regards to google vs. Apple, you have to understand that google isn't competing with apple. They're competing with microsoft.

[Ant @ Mar 14th 2008 6:57AM]

Well for me the best part about the iPhone applications is that many will run on the 'none phone' iPod touch. To me phones me work and work gives me a headache, iPod means free time and messin about. With good free WiFi connections popping up all over the place as the years pass the phone thing is wearing a bit thin with me, well, more to the point the whole contract thing is wearing my pocket thin.

I'd love to see a WiFi device (bluetooth for good measure, accelerometer, all that stuff), just a 300ppi 4inch multi touch borderless screen running a completely open OS like Android with a great SDK that even I could understand, no contracts, just a screen of fun you can put in your pocket, simple.

[addabox @ Mar 14th 2008 7:23AM]

Right. "Easy to use" equals "dumbed down", therefore the iPhone is for "dumb people". Especially "dumb Americans".

Oh, and Apple users are arrogant elitists.

Only on Engadget does aggressive ignorance strut around like the king of the world.

[Chris @ Mar 14th 2008 9:45AM]

"Oh, and Apple users are arrogant elitists."

Thanks. You're so kind. And you have never even met me.

"Right. "Easy to use" equals "dumbed down", therefore the iPhone is for "dumb people"."

I disagree. There's complex and there's needlessly complex. Guess which a smart person would choose? I use both Microsoft and Apple products so I think I am allowed to compare. I own an XBox 360. My iPhone replaces a Windows Mobile '03 smartphone that I owned for 3 years. I'm typing this comment on a Dell Precision Workstation. Microsoft's products are needlessly complex.

[sinjinn @ Mar 14th 2008 11:40AM]

@chris
im quite sure he was being sarcastic. so basically you've just been arguing with someone who agrees with you. you made a lot of smart points in your comment , but they were all underscored by a huge dollop of stupidity. congratulations.

[Chris @ Mar 14th 2008 12:13PM]

I'm familiar with addabox's previous comments and I can guarantee he wasn't being sarcastic.

[addabox @ Mar 14th 2008 2:41PM]

Must have me confused with a different Addabox-- I was reacting to the silly notion that the iPhone's ease of use, which is actually its strongest selling point, somehow makes it "dumb". Or that the cluttered, difficult to use UIs of most phones, which have helped limit market penetration of general purpose computing devices, makes them (or their users) "smart".

[Evan @ Mar 14th 2008 7:59AM]

There's room for both.

[Arvind Prahlad @ Mar 14th 2008 8:02AM]

Rite.....................

[Zak @ Mar 14th 2008 1:08PM]

Your post was one word and you couldn't even spell it right? That qualifies as Epic Fail of the Day.

[Tim @ Mar 14th 2008 8:24AM]

Apples and oranges again. the iPhone is a hardware and software product produced by Apple, Android is a software product marketedby Google. Google wouldn't have to do much to make sure they outsold the iPhone...

[Erick @ Mar 14th 2008 8:21AM]

I think we might be confusing who would buy iphones and android powered phones. It wont be my mom or father in law typically. They will buy the run of the mill clamshell phone that maaaay take a picture if they understood how to work the camera or send a SMS.

Gadget geeks, thats where this conversation is most likely centered around and there is a whole variety of dorks for and against the different platforms but they arent in any way a majority of phone users.

This is like a battle between two ugly fat girls at the railroad tracks in a redneck town relative to the rest of the world's phone users. Nobody really cares except us.

[Matt @ Mar 14th 2008 1:25PM]

The issue with your argument is that there is a relatively high likelihood that android could end up being the OS on a lot of those "run of the mill" phones you speak of. That's what flexibility can do.

That being said... I think it points to how making arguments one way or the other on this issue is a little silly. As many people have pointed out, it's definitely apples and oranges. I'm sure windows mobile handsets have outsold the iphone by a huge margin since it's launch... but that really doesn't mean much. My Blackjack was around a hundred bucks and even my old 8125 was only around 200 when I bought it. I have different options for windows mobile... and some of them are much cheaper than others and a lot of them are definitely cheaper than the one and only "mobile OSX" phone. I like having a keyboard, I like having 3G (among other things)... and there are several handsets that run windows mobile and fit that bill for me right now... and I don't LOVE windows mobile, but I do prefer it to anything else out there at the moment.

I've thought about getting an iphone, but for me, there are better options... and it has little to do with the OS. There just happens to be only one (besides capacity) iphone and it costs too much and I have certain preferences that prevent me from justifying spending so much.

[Studio @ Mar 14th 2008 8:36AM]

I would say they both have different markets for the first few years. Apple already have it's fan base and it's reputation hence you pay for it. Whereas Android it's yet to prove itself to the people, but it can run on a cheaper phones. They created a great buzz, but they need more to persuade people who actually wants to pay a lot of money for a phone which is known to be very good.
However in the longer term i can see them coming in each other's market place. And that competition will be good for us end users.

Other problem i see with Android that they don't design their own hardware like Apple does hence for them to make sure that hw sw works flawlessly is a mayor challenge. Google works with a good number of manufacturers and it would probably take a very heavy involvement with the handset manufacturers to bring it up to the standard of the iPhone. I anticipate that Android phones will be only as good as their hardware manufacturer will be. Some of them will be very poor an some of them will excel.

Let's wait and see, but i wouldn't discount the power($) of Google!

[mymaclife @ Mar 14th 2008 8:47AM]

Only a truly stupid person would generalize about how stupid or not a person is by the phone they choose to use.

[ThePremierAssassin @ Mar 14th 2008 8:51AM]

I'm still confused as hell about this Android business...is it a phone? What the hell is it supposed to do and WHY is it being compared to the iPhone?

Plus are there any pictures of what this phone will look like even? Cuz it really doesn't matter how great it is on the inside if it doesn't look half as decent on the outside.

Say what you will about the iPhone but the thing is damn sexy....