I've had my Android phone for ~14 months now. It's a HTC Desire and it served me quite well. I can say that it really changed how I do certain things, from reading news to moving around.
There is a major problem however with Android as an operating system: it's a resource hog. Until the internal storage memory was big enough to hide the problem, Android phones, sooner or later, would hit the 15 MB threshold of minimum free space. Each application you install leaves something hanging around once uninstalled, so it's not really a matter of
if, but of
when you're going to hit the problem. So to free up some space you uninstall an application or two, trying to ignore the fact that
you're only making room for other app's leftovers. The worst part is that when you have less than 15 MB of free storage, your phone stops syncing data and reporting app updates, which makes having a smartphone pointless. Of course this is no longer a problem on newer phones.
Compared to iOS and Windows Phone 7 (yes, WP7),
Android is extremely slow. Animations are not fluid, installing an app blocks everything else, so much as if you receive a phone call in that few seconds the phone restarts. And mind you, my phone has a
1 GHz processor. One gigahertz! And 576 MB of RAM! How was that thing about flying Apollo to the Moon with the same computing power as a C64?
So obviously the solution
must be
throwing more hardware at the problem. Android Phones with
dual-core 1.5 GHz processors are in stores right now. Fast smartphones for everyone!
Oh really!? This is insane.
The point is, Android has become very like Windows. The fact that it's flexible, open and compatible with diverse hardware is its main culprit, because it makes it slow. It's a huge pile of layers over layers over layers of abstraction and bad software design decisions.
The first iPhone was very fast, and it only had a 600 MHz processor and hardly any RAM. Windows Phone 7 is much faster and fluid than any dual-core Android phone, even if its hardware is still single-core 1 GHz.
Android is probably going to die under its own weight - if only because software can grow much faster than hardware. You can only fit so much cores into a handheld device with a finite battery.
Despite that, when it will be time to upgrade, my next phone will run Android. The reason is Google Maps, and the tight integration with the other Google services like GMail. It's probably something that will upset EU antitrust sooner or later, yet it's what makes Android a good platform. Not because it's open, not because it's available on a huge number of devices, but because of a handful of killer applications that Google will either not release for other platforms, or will keep them behind in terms of features on platforms other than Android. Remove that, and
Android is is worth zero.
Companies are starting to build things on Android, like Amazon's Kindle Fire. Funnily enough, Amazon didn't even mention it's based on Android. The OS has become a commodity and the real value is in what you build on top of it.
It's like the pre-Internet era of desktop operating systems. The most concerning aspect is that the entity that really moves Android forward, despite the consortium behind it, is Google. Too bad Google isn't making that much money with Android. Despite the impressive growth in the installed base,
mobile ads are just a tiny fraction of Google's ads revenue, and they're hardly covering the costs of development, marketing and management of the entire Android ecosystem. Hardware makers are actually making money, and that's probably why Google acquired Motorola.
So the point is,
does it make sense for Google to keep working on Android without forcing themselves to be yet another smartphone maker? After all, Microsoft makes more profits selling Windows licenses than what they would make by directly printing Dollars, and they never even imagined building hardware or acquiring hardware companies.
