This page was last updated 7 November 2010.
iPhone vs. Android shoot-out
There is a fairly fundamental difference in the design goals for
the iPhone and Android devices. The iPhone is designed for a range
of separate sequential tasks that it does very beautifully. You ask
it to do something - like checking your mail, calling up a web page,
or looking up map directions. You ask the iPhone a question and it's
very good at giving you the answers. There are rather few things it
does on its own, like waiting for incoming calls or emails, and the
operating system is tailored to permit exactly those few things.
The Android system, on the other hand, is more like an assistant
who is constantly scouring the Internet for you, and telling you
when something happens that interests you. Both devices are always-on,
but Android takes it to a new level because it has its fingers in
all sorts of Internet services at the same time. Whenever something
happens on any of your social web services - any chat service,
Facebook, Twitter, RSS news, Flickr (I can't think of an exception
right now), it will see it and alert you. You do not have to call
up an app to check Twitter, and then another one for Facebook, and
then a third one for news. That would defeat the whole purpose.
People who debate the merits of OS arcana like multitasking, activity
sharing, notification systems, impact on battery life, and so on
miss the point. Even the iTunes debate seems beside the point to
me - the entire notion of hooking up a cable or pressing buttons
to "sync" data from one physical device in your hand to another
physical device on your desk seems outdated, no matter how elegantly
iTunes does its job. You might as well connect an RS232 cable and
start Xmodem; same principle. A device like Android isn't about
explicit syncing to be brought up to date with a desktop or the
Internet. Instead, it's an integral part of the Internet.
If you'll forgive the hyperbole, the iPhone now seems like the
ultimate refinement of 20th-century design dogmas, while Android
is a 21st-century design - often not yet as refined as the iPhone,
but a generation ahead.
But let me quickly add that much of the time, you do want to have
a specific problem solved like looking up Wikipedia or finding the
nearest bus stop, and here the devices are far closer and implementation
designs do matter. If you aren't into social webs, the decision is
pretty open. Much of the remainder of this page is about those
implementation details, so you can decide which matter to you and
choose accordingly.
It's also important to distinguish between the operation system
(Android) and the hardware it runs on. For most phones, with the
exception of the iPhone, different companies write the software and
build the hardware. My hardware is an HTC Desire, which is cheaply
thrown together and highly unreliable.
I am not lucky with cell phones: both my new iPhone and my new
Desire had to be sent in for repairs. In the process I found that it
takes some getting used to Android after using an iPhone for two years,
but it is very painful to return to an iPhone after using Android. Any
new OS is awkward at first because old habits no longer apply, but for
some very basic things like app switching just aren't there on the
iPhone. Steve Jobs wants to keep things as simnple as possible, and I
commend the idea, but I'll stick with Einstein: "make things as simple
as possible, but not simpler".
Ok, on to the comparison. In a nutshell:
| iPhone | Android
|
|---|
|
Simplicity, elegance, polish, consistency. Very easy to learn.
|
Powerful, open, innovative, occasionally playful.
|
|
Spartan, artificial limitations.
|
More core design features, such as active widgets and mingling
of app features and data, that make things possible the iPhone's
high walls between apps prevent.
|
|
Walled garden, censorship, closed, Apple police behind every
bush. Difficult to store and exchange data; relies on USB
cable connection to iTunes on a single desktop machine.
|
Open standards, free data exchange, no police - but also noone
who stops standards violations. You are free to choose providers
but also required to choose providers.
|
|
Always puts form over function, good at omitting unnecessary toy
features but occasionally also omits necessary features. For
example, an iPhone cannot answer the question "what's going on"
at a glance, by design.
|
On balance, there is more to learn, more to explore, and occasionally
uneven quality and multiple ways to present data and to do things.
The Android world is moving forward very rapidly compared to the
iPhone's very placid progress, and sometimes things feel like they
aren't mature yet.
|
|
If a feature is missing, you aren't supposed to need it.
|
If a feature is missing, someone is already working on it.
|
Before we get down to the details, here is a bird's-eye comparison of
features that matter to me:
| iPhone | iPhone with mobile me | Android
|
|---|
| Telephony*
| One or two providers per country,
SIM lock
| One or two providers per country,
SIM lock
| any,
free
|
| Browser
| Webkit-based (Safari)
| Webkit-based (Safari)
| Webkit-based
|
| Email
| Apple Mail
| Apple Mail
| Android Mail, Google Mail,
third-party: K9 mail
|
| Calendar sync
| none (iTunes cable sync),
limited support for CalDAV
| mobile me Calendar,
limited support for CalDAV
| any CalDAV, eg. Google Calendar
|
| Contacts
| none (iTunes cable sync)
| mobile me: Address Book
| Gmail address book
|
| RSS news
| third party, eg. Free RSS
| third party, eg. Free RSS
| builtin,
third party, eg. Sparse RSS
|
| Photo galleries
| none (iTunes cable sync)
| mobile me: iPhoto Gallery
(with extra app)
| many, eg. Google Picasa
|
| Builtin chat
| Apple iChat, only when app is running
| Apple iChat, only when app is running
| Google Jabber, always online
|
| Skype*
| yes
| yes
| not yet, chat only
|
| Podcasts
| iTunes
| iTunes
| third party, eg. dPod
|
| Online maps
| Google Maps, limited functionality
| Google Maps, limited functionality
| Google Maps, almost full functionality
|
| Offline maps
| third party, eg. OffMaps
| third party, eg. OffMaps
| third party, eg. Map Droyd
|
| Tethering*
| extra cost
| extra cost
| free
|
| network disk
| third party, eg. Dropbox.com
| mobile me: iDisk,
third party, eg. Dropbox.com
| third party, eg. Dropbox.com
|
* Assuming an unbranded Android phone, which, unlike iPhones, are
freely available. Branded and subsidized phones can be arbitrarily
butchered, regardless of brand or manufacturer.
Just to get it out of the way: Android is sometimes referred to
as a "Linux phone", trying to imply that only geeks could love it,
like a Linux desktop 20 years ago, and sensible people should stay
away. That's nonsense. Despite all their differences, both phones
live in the Unix OS family tree, and the OS does not shine through
on either phone. Why should it?
The discussion below compares my HTC Desire Android phone with my
iPhone 3G. All of HTC's phones have some extra apps and skins designed
by HTC, called Sense. I'll refer to naked Android, and iOS 4 occasionally.
I'll mark Android wins green, and iPhone wins red. You'll see more green
than red, but that just reflects my decision to switch from iPhone to
Android.
General user interface
Android's title line is much more useful than the iPhone's. Both show
basic stuff like the time and battery, GSM receptions meters, and wireless
status for GSM/Edge/GSM, WLAN, and Bluetooth. Android has a slight advantage
since it has a roaming indicator and shows ongoing GSM up/down data activity.
But the key difference is that Android puts important events there, like
when a mail or chat request arrives, a call bounces, a download finishes,
news arrive, and so on. All at one glance on any screen and in any app
(that doesn't claim the entire screen space at least - but you'll still
see the flashing LED). If you want to learn more, tap the status bar and
drag it down to reveal details and buttons that take you to the appropriate
app - all without leaving the current app. With the iPhone, you'd have to
exit the current app periodically and scroll through the home screen pages
to search for badges superimposed on app icons, and then call up each one
with a badge separately to see what's up.
This is not a minor issue, it's a key design win of Android. Whenever
something interesting happens, regardless of which app you are using
and which other app has detected the event, you'll be told and can call
up details and respond. A phone that's always on, and tries to be your
window to the Internet and not just a fancy query device, must have such
a way to communicate events in realtime. Icon badges don't count.
The Android home screen is limited to 7 pages, but they don't just show a
5x4 grid of icons. They can also show configurable widgets that can take up
as much space as they want, and show real data. The phone comes with a big
clock widget, an email widget, a messenger widgets, and others preset. This
fixes one of the iPhone's biggest flaws: there is no one-stop home page
that gives an overview of what's currently happening. On the iPhone you
must start many apps and kill them again to get the same info. The best the
iPhone can do is put a little number on an icon with the number of mails or
whatever. That's pathetic, even Nokia never had anything this impractical.
Apps you have installed but didn't place on a home screen are accessible
through a button. That said, some of those widgets are awfully large...
The iPhone puts all programs it knows onto the home screen, where you can
arrange them on up to 11 pages and their folders. Android has a program
list, and you decide which programs you want to put on the home screen.
Android comes with more apps, so if you don't want an app you won't see
it on your home screen at all. With iOS 4, you can at least drag unwanted
icons into a junk folder.
There is a major flaw in Android's home screen rearrangenment method:
you can hold and drag an icon to a new empty spot, but you can't drag
it between two existing icons, moving the one at the target position
aside. In practice, if you want to swap two icons on a full home page,
you have to remove and re-add one. The iPhone doesn't win this one
because iOS 4 makes it very difficult to drag an icon between two
others; you'll probably inadvertently create a folder if you try that.
Overall, I expected a much less polished look from the Android than I
was used to from the iPhone. This is not the case, at least not from
the apps it came with, and I am testing HTC's Sense, not the vanilla
Android interface. Still, it actually feels a step ahead of the iPhone.
If you don't like the 4x4 app launcher, Android lets you choose another
one, but the iPhone doesn't.
The iPhone's 4x4 grid of app icons is so boring and poorly designed,
like someone had cast the simplest possible design in stone regardless
of how inconvenient and lacking of functionality it is. And the iPhone's
configurability seems awfully spartan - it's like a breath of fresh air
to see Android do all the things that fell through the cracks at
Cupertino, or fell victim to the minimalist design. (To Apple's credit,
they got the major options right, it's the smaller things such as font
size selection that they left out.)
At the same time, Android doesn't degenerate into Symbian's maze of
confusing and overlapping option dialogs; everything seems nicely sorted
away where you'd expect it. This is partly a matter of taste - why does
the iPhone put the three different wireless enable switches (Wifi, cell
network, Bluetooth) in three different menu nesting levels, for example?
Whether you like Androids more powerful preferences or not depends on
whether you subscribe to the Spartan philosophy, I suppose - I like
minimalist elegance but not if it imposes artificial barriers that
prevent me from doing things I need; your mileage is certain to vary.
Connectivity and data exchange
An iPhone cannot live without iTunes on Mac or Windows computer. That's
the only way to transfer music, video, photos, address books, calendars,
and pretty much everything else. If you pay for Apple's mobile me service,
it syncs at least calendars, address books, and some minor stuff over the
air, but nothing else (but these two work extremely well). And it must
be a
single iTunes computer, you can't load more videos on the
road if you brought a notebook. And the connection to iTunes is by USB
cable. It feels like a time warp back to 1970 with RS-232 serial cables
and Xmodem.
Android is not shackled to a PC program. It's a modern always-online
device that talks directly to the network for all its needs, wherever
you are. Google offers several of these services, like calendars and
address books, but it's all based on open standards so other providers
can be used as well. The downside is that you'll need to configure each
provider; there is no "single sign-on" outside of the Google services.
the keyboard can be calibrated. I make fewer mistakes on it than on the
iPhone. Hold-for-symbols is very convenient too because you always see
everything on the key caps. But the little popup that shows which key
you have pressed is too indistinct and too far removed from the key.
Multiple typo suggestions are great but I often switch between three
languages, and since Android has no dedicated keyboard key for that, this
makes the typo fix mode two button taps harder to use for me. I guess I
need to try out some of Android's alternate keyboard apps. Yes, Steve,
on Android there is an app for that. Several, in fact.
no Skype calling, only chat. Supposed to come later in 2010. Skype is
lame.
An iPhone must be activated by Apple to work at all. An Android doesn't ask
you to do this, but there are important apps - like Gmail push mail and the
App Market - that will ask you to create a Google account. You need to agree
to Additional Privacy Policies that I haven't been able to find. My first
attempts failed with a message "Can't establish a reliable data connection
to the server". I think it wants 3G, not WLAN.
The builtin Android mailer does not support an unified inbox. However, it
only takes one tap to see all inboxes, with number of unread messages,
and a second tap switches to that inbox. Better than iPhone 3, worse than
iPhone 4. Annoyingly, it always sends alternative base64 / HTML; There is
no option to set it to plain text. The mailer has a useful thread view
mode and attachment finder, and it can save attachments to the memory card.
But Android doesn't limit you to the builtin mailer - I switched
to K9, and I am very happy with it. My only minor complaint is that it
takes a while to tell it exactly which mail accounts and folder contents
are important and should be sorted to the top of the unified inbox,
although I am glad it has such a feature.
the browser is as good as Apple's, since it's also webkit. It supports
double-tapping, but the meaning is not "2D-zoom until the block fits the
screen width", but "make the block readable with a standard font size, even
if this means re-layouting". Android zooms text better, but Apple zooms
images better. Android can play embedded movies, what a relief! No more
exiting the browser and starting a YouTube app.
A first non-representative impression is that the Android Marketplace and
the Apple app store are similarly well-stocked, although both have gaps.
Android apps seem to be a little more expensive but also more powerful,
and I see more apps with ad bars than on the iPhone (they are about the
same size). Apple's iAd is still relatively new. Both shops are hard to
search, you can't tell which of the 50 hits is the right one for you.
iPhone apps tend to follow Apple's spartan motif. This is also true for
the builtin apps: Google Maps for Android is light-years ahead of Google
maps for the iPhone. The number of apps in either store (Apple is ahead)
means very little because so many apps are useless or redundant. So what
if Apple has 50 Twitter apps and Android has only 25?
Hardware
This applies to the HTC Desire; there are many Android phones with
different specs and better quality.
The iPhone is beautiful hardware design. Compared to the iPhone, the
HTC Desire is shoddy Taiwan junk. Plastic all over, often overheats
and reboots. It's the most unreliable piece of hardware I have ever
owned. The iPhone overheats rarely and when it does, it shows a
tasteful warning display. If you look for quality or if you depend
on your phone, avoid HTC - but with Android, the choice is yours.
Exchangeable battery!
Battery life seems similar. Better than the iPhone 3 though.
Exchangeable micro-SD memory card! (But exchangeable only when
powered off, on the HTC Desire; that's lame.)
My Desire has much better reception than my iPhone 3. It sees 15 WLANs
here at home; the iPhone shows 6. My Bluetooth headset stays connected
if the phone is in my front pants pocket.
Screen is far better than on the iPhone 3, and similar to the iPhone 4
despite a slightly lower resolution. It works in bright sunlight, but
it's very pale, and dark areas lose contrast altogether. I haven't been
able to compare it to the iPhone 4 because the only iPhone 4 owner I
know refused to let me take it outside into the sun :-)
The iPhone's antiglare and anti-fingerprint display coating is better.
The Back button is great. It goes back wherever you are. on the iPhone, it's
usually a little arrow button at the top left, sometimes it's Ok/Cancel,
and sometimes (when you are at whatever the app calls its top menu) it's
the hardware home button.
The "Menu" hardware button is great as well. All the options and
preferences in one easy to find place. The iPhone puts all preferences
into a separate app, but this is so inconvenient that many apps ignore
that convention and find some place to put a preferences button right
into the app. And options are typically in a button at the bottom.
Consider the "Menu" hardware button Android's answer to MacOS X's
Apple-comma shortcut.
In general, the idea of using hardware buttons for those things
that all apps need very much appeals to me. Suddenly the iPhone's
standard key operations like Back, Home, menu, and Search seem
convoluted and awkward to me. Odd, I didn't feel that way before
I compared them to the Android.
The GPS receiver is about on par with Apple's. Both compare to a pro
navigation receiver like the Garmin eTrex in the same way that the
builtin miniature camera compares to a dedicated compact camera (let
alone a DSLR) - slow, imprecise, hard to use in difficult situations,
but good enough for placing you on a map and simple navigation. But
the Android API permits third-party apps like GPS Status that can tell
you how many satellites it sees, where they are, and signal strength.
That's invaluable for getting a fix in difficult situations because
you'll know if you need to move to a better place to get a fix.
iPhones can't do that.
No mute switch. Seems minor but makes a big difference to me. The
stock Android is better than HTC's Sense interface here because it
puts mute on the unlock screen.
Default Apps
The big Flash controversy is about two independent observations: first,
Flash is said to be bad technology because it's heavy, slow, and
integrates poorly into a browser. Second, many web sites are accessible
only if you have Flash, so regardless of whether you like Flash or not,
you need it. Maybe, in many years, HTML 5 supersedes Flash, but this is
very obviously not the case today.
Apple takes the high road and doesn't support Flash at all, although
the move looks motivated more by maintaining absolute control - Apple
forbids any form of scripting or any other kind of interpreted language
on the iPhone! If you think you own your iPhone after you bought it and
can do anything you like with it, think again... Android doesn't have
a full Flash implementation but it's good enough to make most web sites
accessible that remain closed to iPhone users.
Android stole Apple's trick of rotating the calculator to show extra
functions. But Android is rather lobotomized, it doesn't even have a
memory.
The pictures taken with the camera are quite good if there is enough light.
The picture viewer has a Share menu item that shows 11 different things you
can do with it, depending on how many apps you have installed that know how
to send data. For example, I have installed the Google Goggles app, which
analyzes pictures and tells you what you are seeing; it shows up as one of
the Share targets. Brilliant. On the iPhone you can email your photo or
send it to Mobile Me (an Apple service), that's it.
Twitter, Facebook, Jabber, and Flickr are fully integrated. You'll feel
left out if you don't have accounts there. (Personally, I do not have a
Facebook account because I don't like to hand over my private data to
Facebook for them to sell to anyone.)
During my experiments I turned on Google Latitude, which lets friends
track my location. Google sent a mail explaining what has happened,
with instructions for turning Latitude off. It's opt-in
and
protects you against accidental opt-in. Well done, especially for a
company with such a
cavalier attitude towards privacy.
Mobile me is a closed Apple ecosystem, and you have to pay $99 for what
you get for free from other vendors. What you do get for your money is a
polished and well-integrated experience, but it's more limited and often
unreliable (see
http://www.bitrot.de/macmobileme.html).
Address book: I would trust Apple more with my personal address book
than Google, but to be honest, that's more because Google has always
been in the business of monetizing data and Apple is just now getting
into it.
Bought the Oxford French Dictionary from the Android Market for 20 Euro.
Very bad integration: it's an in-app purchase and the Market doesn't handle
this at all. The app opens a web page where you have to enter contact and
credit card info. Got into trouble at first because I didn't have cookies
enabled and had to do it all over again. Not sure if this is Oxford's
fault or a flaw in the Android Market.
Folders: I had to ask Google for instructions to place folders in the main
iPhone menu. It's actually reasonably intuitive, but less so than the rest
of the iPhone. Android wins: a folder is simply one of the things you can
add if you press the "+" button. I can't decide which presentation I like
better - the iPhone doesn't visually distinguish folder contents much and
the folder contents have an arrow that points to the folder icon, even
though I went FROM the folder TO its contents; on the other hand Android
doesn't let me rearrange folder contents even though folders hold more
icons (16 instead of 9).
Developing: I used to be a paid-up iPhone app developer for a year. It
was a highly frustrating experience. Apple uses a language a friend calls
"objectionable C" that nobody else uses, which is a creaky mixture of C
and Smalltalk. It's one of the early groping attempts at object-oriented
languages in the early 1980s, and its age is painfully obvious. Because
of Apple's draconian legal obstacles to sharing, it's a totally closed
ecosystem with poor documentation and borderline-fascist certificate
limitations. In hindsight, much of the required documentation exists, but
it's a very steep learning curve and you quickly get a bloody nose from
running into the artificial barriers erected by Apple. I am used to open
software development, not boot camps with armed guards at the fence.
My general impression with both programming environments is that Apple
has circumscribed the feature set. You can do anything that Apple has
anticipated and provided an API for, but anything they left out is not
possible at all. It's closed. Android, on the other hand, gives you
access to pretty much everything and does not limit what you do with it.
Imho, both system have comparable complexity and learning curve (except
you probably know Java already but probably not Objective C).
Minor observations
Here are some other observations that I think are not important enough
to influence an Android/iPhone decision, but I have talked to friends who
disagree.
Setting up WLAN is just as easy as on the iPhone, and centuries ahead
of Nokia.
Android has an interesting Wifi sleep policy to save power.
Data roaming is off by default, like on the iPhone.
Android has a neat info screen that shows battery usage per app or
feature.
On Android, dragging past the end stops abruptly; iPhone overscrolls and
snaps back.
HTC's Sense weather app is pretty but over-engineered. You just want to
know whether it will rain, and see clouds move across your screen.
Android bug: the weather widget shows the configured places, and
also the place I am currently in but that's always wrong on my
phone. Marseille is misspelled Marseilles. .
Android has a scroll button at the bottom, like an inverted mouse. It's
occasionally useful, especially for positioning the text cursor, but kind
of redundant, the touch screen is very good.
Android has an FM radio. What is that good for?
The Desire's weight and size are almost the same as the iPhone 3, but
the Desire looks smaller because of its rounded edges. It even looks
smaller than the iPhone 4 which is much thinner. Its screen is
a little bigger than the iPhone 3's. The iPhone looks bulkier, but the
Desire's two-tone bezel may not meet everybody's taste.
Cool Android idea: reduce ringer volume when the phone is picked up.
Many Android menus have a "more" button with the same three-dot icon as
on the iPhone. If you press it, the extra options replace the original
menu while on the iPhone the original menu options remain visible. A
friend of mine who favors the iPhone assures me that this is a major
point for Apple. (I don't really care so I filed it under "minor".)
The phone preferences are well laid out on both phones. Android has a
slight advantage because app preferences don't fill up the toplevel
preferences screen, and Android had no need to hide away half the phone
preferences behind a rather nondescript "General" submenu like the iPhone
does.
Interesting link: http://blog.louisgray.com/2010/07/why-i-turned-in-my-iphone-and-went.html.