redstater

ericthehalfbee said:

Come on DED, do you have to keep hurling mud at the Google users with yet ANOTHER article? Why kick a dog when they're down?

They are only "down" in the eyes of Apple fans such as yourself. In the eyes of everyone else - including objective reality - quite the contrary. Rising market share. Everyone except Sony and HTC making profits. An increasing number of devices, including more companies making them. Rising profits for Google (to the point where nearly everyone is suing them trying to get a piece of it). And so on. You can argue that Android won't sustain their current uptick. Recall that Android folks stated the same ... that the boom that Apple experienced by copying the Samsung Galaxy with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus wasn't going to last. It didn't ... it petered out in less than 18 months. But please remember that while the iPhone 6 boom was going on, Apple fans predicted that Android was over and would never recover. Turned out to be totally wrong, just as has been every other prediction of Android's demise since the product was first released in 2008. But here's reality: if a product has been on the market for 8 years, has consistently increased sales during that time in spite of local and global economic problems, and its only competitor prices out 75% of the potential market, it isn't going anywhere. Apple knows this, which is why they cut prices. The 4 inch iPhone SE was only the beginning. Look for a full-sized and lower cost iPhone 7 this year. Apple joining the race to the bottom? Nope. Apple is merely recognizing that all devices drop in price when the newness wears off, and mobile devices are no different. The only amazing thing is that it took so long, as Apple cut prices on their iPad line by offering very inexpensive iPad Minis in response to Nexus 7 type devices years ago. If Apple had dropped prices on the iPhone at the same time, it might have made a difference, but just like multi-tasking and devices bigger than 4 inches, it was too little, too late.

Apple fans view Android as a failed product (even as Apple "adopts" more and more Android features) that will inevitably crash. People in the U.S. and worldwide continue to buy more Android products. Frustration over their failed predictions of Android doom cause even more such predictions, which fuel even more frustration. Year after year after year. Rinse, lather, repeat.

This article is wrong in so many ways. Let me enumerate some of them.

1. Google didn't try to use Android to destroy Apple. First, Android was entirely about keeping Microsoft from destroying Google. If Google hadn't created Android, they would be out of business by now. And Apple wouldn't have done a thing to save them because - like any good company - Apple is only out for itself and leaves other companies to fend for themselves on their own merits. Had Google gone out of business, Apple would have just joined itself to Microsoft as it has plenty of times in the past, and just as they have now joined up with their old enemy IBM, just as they now rely on previous enemy Intel for their PC chips, and just as they frequently rely on alleged enemies/competitors Samsung, Sony and LG for various components. Also, there is a difference between creating your own product to compete with someone - again which Google had to do in order to survive as Google was far more concerned with locking Microsoft out than taking market share from Apple - and trying to destroy someone. My goodness, the negative attitude that Apple fans have towards competition is unreal. Other companies have just as much right to compete against Apple as Apple does everyone else. If anyone is "destroying" people it is Apple ... look at all the music players they put out of business with the iPod. If it weren't for Playstation, Sony would be toast, especially since Sony also no longer manufacturers PCs, again thanks largely to Apple. And look at what happened to the previous companies that were making cell phones like Nokia and Motorola ... gone. And if it weren't for Google and Android, even more of them would be. Ridiculous ...

2. Yes, Google is doomed. Actually ... not really. I have done a search on Daniel Eran Dilger's columns and he has been predicting the imminent failure of Android and Google for several years. Yet Android's market share is higher than ever, and Google's profits from Android have skyrocketed in the last 4 years, as the Oracle trial is revealing. Also, Apple is not going to lock Google out of mobile search. Why? Because the competitor's mobile search options - including Microsoft's - stink and Apple lacks the inclination to go into this area on their own. Apple cares greatly about offering its users the best mobile experience, so as long as Google continues to pay Apple $1 billion a year, Apple will take it. Another thing: Google's apps and services - including Chrome - are very popular on iOS. 99% of iOS users could care less about this "war" between Apple and Google. They will keep using Gmail, Google Maps, the Chrome browser etc. just as they do on other platforms. Incidentally, we already know from the Oracle trial that Google would be fine from the billions in profits that they are now making on Android search. Add that to the billions that they are still getting from PC (Windows and Mac OS X ... but mostly Windows) search and even if Apple did inflict the awesomeness that is Bing, GoDuckGo and whatever on their users, Google would be fine. But put it this way ... Firefox shifted their default search from Google to (soon to be bankrupt) Yahoo. Result? Firefox's marketshare plummeted, and Google Chrome's share skyrocketed. That's exactly why Apple won't lock Google out ... it wouldn't work, it would cause Google no real harm, so it would only hurt their own users. 

3. Claiming that Google's desire for Instant apps is trying to prop up search or address fragmentation is ... well a not very technical claim. Put it this way ... Google is an Internet and cloud software and services company. In fact, Google (along with Amazon) practically invented the industry. What are apps? They aren't this magical, mystical things. They are software. Shifting software from being locally installed to being accessed through the cloud or being offered as a service (software as a service) is precisely what Google does and has always done. Google Docs? Cloud software meant to replace Microsoft Office. Introduced it in 2006. And so forth. As a matter of fact, cloud-based and service-based software was the entire rationale for their (failed) Chrome OS. (Ridiculously, Ballmer thought that Chrome OS was the big threat and was convinced that Android would fail. Instead, Chrome OS gained no traction apart from public schools and Android zealots while Android ran them out of mobile. Note that I didn't say Apple ... people were always going to buy iPads and iPhones regardless. The battle was always over who was going to be the alternative to Apple, and Google won that battle largely because Microsoft underestimated Android because they thought that Google's plan to make money on services and apps as opposed to license sales  would fail.) Google has been working on providing apps as a service since at least 2012. And why not? Google doesn't make money on hardware. Also, the Android OEMs cannot keep up with Apple's hardware innovation and integration. It is in Google's interests to make the software as important and the hardware as irrelevant as possible. That is what software companies have always done. If you can get great software to run on cheap hardware, then people have more money to buy software. Also, the company with the best software wins because having the best hardware is a lot less important. To his credit, Tim Cook knows that this is coming: that cloud and service software is the next big thing. It's why he hired 4500 cloud/service programmers in India. No, it isn't just about Apple Maps (or fixing the iTunes/Apple Music compatibility issues). It is to create the next generation of consumer and enterprise cloud/software products. This is something that Apple ceded to the likes of Microsoft in the 90s and 00s to focus on hardware, and they aren't going to make that mistake again. 

Again, Google has no problem with mobile apps ... they make a ton of money on them! Not as much as Apple does - largely because Google is locked out of China - but still plenty. They are doing instant apps because they hope that AAAS (apps as a service, after SAAS, software as a service) will make them even more money because that is what they do. And yes, in 2018 Apple will offer their own apps as a service for iOS, watchOS, tvOS and Mac OS X too. 

Bottom line: sitting around hoping Google will fail isn't going to work. Google dominates search because they have the best product by far. They are a competitive cloud company because they have a good product there also, plus they offer analytics that the other main cloud competitors (Microsoft and Amazon) can't match. And Android will remain because Apple is not going to be the only game in mobile ... there is going to be competition no matter how much some Apple fans hate and resent the concept and Android is going to be that competition because no one else has a competitive app store, not Amazon and especially not Microsoft. 

But hey, Apple is still going to be 10 times more profitable than Google. Google will make $4 billion in a typical quarter, Apple will make $40 billion. Considering that fact - and a bunch of others - I have no idea why the existence of Google and Android is so bothersome for Apple fans. Google is no threat to Apple at all. And you know who agrees with this? Google. Google doesn't even view Apple as a competitor: they are far more concerned with what Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook are doing. That was why Google scrambled to get their new VR product Daydream out. Why? Because they lost Samsung and HTC to the Facebook/Oculus VR platform. Competing with Force Touch and other Apple stuff took a back-burner.

cali said:

This is fucking disgusting.

The fact you can just steal a company's hard work and creation and sell it right next to the original is sad.

I watched the full 2007 iPhone keynote yesterday and it changed my view even more on IP theft. I have ZERO respect for the knockoff brands and have even more respect for Apple.

the part where Steve says "we filed over 200 patents for this phone and we plan on protecting them". It's like he truly believed his work would be protected but the U.S. government didn't give a shit and it's probably worse in other countries.

Imagine the billions of dollars IP theft had caused Apple?

IP theft? The Microsoft Windows case from decades ago demonstrated that general UX/UI concepts aren't copyrightable. Because of this, Apple never accused Google of infringement, and was only able to get a small judgment from Samsung because they went beyond general UX/UI and specifically set out to make their product look as much like an iPhone as possible, which got them dinged over "trade dress" instead of intellectual property (which is why the judgment was so small.) The courts, both domestic and international, have long held that taking UX/UI concepts is no more "stealing" than using general hardware designs, such as what Apple did when they created their own ARM CPUs. In order to be consistent, you would need the position that Apple should have designed their own CPUs entirely from the ground up. Otherwise, you would be taking the position that UX/UI is really what matters, and the hardware that makes the UX/UI possible in the first place is trivial. Then again, that may be Apple's position after all, as even while they were suing Samsung and threatening LG, HTC and other Android OEMs over UX/UI before finally giving up on that failed strategy, they themselves were found to be violating hardware patents for 2G/LTE tech by Ericsson and CPU designs by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Basically, can't complain about what the other guy is doing when your guy is doing the same. You may have wanted Apple to enjoy a monopoly, but similar to Microsoft in the 1990s, Google and their partners came out with good products that was able to compete at a lot of price points. So, it should suffice to merely be glad that Apple enjoys a 48% market share in the U.S. mobile industry, a lot better than the 5%-10% market share that they enjoyed in the PC market in the 90s and 00s.

apple ][ said:

How many Android users will be using this newest OS when it gets released?

0.0001736%

  

I haven't seen any recent charts, but the majority of Android users are still probably on an ancient version of Android that was released a long, long time ago.

33% of users are on 2013's KitKat. 36% of users are on 2014's Lollipop. 7.5% are on 2015's Marshmallow. 25% of Android users are on versions released before 2013.