The interesting thing about the iOS and Android debate is that I have not seen one Android phone I would ever buy. They’re all universally ugly, or at least not as pretty as the latest revision of the iPhone, but certainly nicer then the last revision. This leads to a strange internal conundrum; how to tell friends with Android phones that their phones are simply not as nice as mine.

That’s a hardware issue, and Google doesn’t really care about this. They don’t make hardware (excluding the Nexus, which falls into the same rules above). They simply ship out a mobile OS for free. Yes, for free. Android costs nothing to get and put on hardware. This is why there are so many Android phones out there, from the fancy and expensive to the cheap and cheerful. Some of them are so cheap that it irritates me that simply running Android means the device is now in the “smartphone” category. A lot of ‘droid phones are not smart.

Google cares about software. This software is something they revise very regularly, much like Apple’s yearly update cycle for iOS (the 5th iteration is due in a month or two). The difference is that Google, because they don’t make hardware, keep revising their software in a way that means older handsets can’t use the new software. Sure, iOS5 won’t run on the original iPhone or the iPhone 3G, but those phones are a few years out of touch now and have had the chance to die gracefully. If you bought an Android last year, there’s a high possibility that you’re not going to be able to run the latest software.

Google are irritated by iOS. Apple are irritated by Android. Neither are in a direct war per se, but Eric Schmidt (Google) has made some pretty strong comments about Apple, noting that Apple are only “going after” Google because they can’t innovate anymore. His suggestion is that iOS is weak and Android is the holy grail of mobile OS.

I disagree. But that’s just me. I have friends who think Android is great. But none of them think iOS stinks, interestingly…

There are many, many anti-trust cases popping up between these big mobile companies. Mobile is big business. You have your phone on you all the time, while your laptop is only on your person occasionally. Owning that market means a lot. Google don’t make money from Android now, but they will monetise it at some point.

What happens when Google makes money from Android? Well, it depends on the model they take. They can license the software out to vendors, which could cause vendors to stop using it altogether (remember, it’s free now) which will drop their impressive sales figures for Android devices. They could put ads in it (the typical Google tact), which could irritate the consumer (Android was free, but the consumer still pays top dollar euro for their device).

As for anti-trust cases, I reckon Google has no case to make. They dominate the web with search, news, email and other services. Soon they’ll (likely) dominate social with Google+. I think Google are great, and I’ll gladly use their services and have ads on them as long as I get them for free. I even use Google Apps for my domains and back-end services. However, dominating the market, getting your branding out there and then acquiring a company that makes a mobile OS and flooding the market with it by leveraging your brand and fat bank account to try and cut out iOS is not a business model that you then try to use to take anti-trust cases.

Basically, Google are huge regardless of Android. Thus, when they put it out there for free and figure out how to make money off it later they enter murky legal territory. They’re going to change their own terms of service in order to generate revenue. The practice is very much what Microsoft did in the 90s with Windows, and we all know how that went.

In 1998 (or so) Steve Jobs came back out as Apple’s CEO. He was back a year and he declared “in order for Apple to win, Microsoft doesn’t have to lose”. What he was saying is that the two are separate products for different people. Apple haven’t necessarily said anything about the Android v iOS thing, but they are certainly pulling the same strings now as they did in 1998. In order for iOS to be successful with iPhone, iPod and iPad, Android doesn’t necessarily have to lose. Android can do its thing while iOS does its thing. I don’t believe for a second that Apple engineers have labs full of Android devices for testing. I do believe Google engineers have iOS devices for testing.