I am the owner of a smartphone, it is minimalistic, black, sleek, shiny and has a touchscreen. By now you are probably thinking ‘iPhone’, however you would be wrong, but you would certainly not be in the minority, and indeed many people who have actually physically seen my phone mistake it for an iPhone. It generally goes like this, ‘I didn’t know you had an iPhone...oh wait it’s not...but its like an iPhone...[confused and puzzled expression]...what is it?’, at which point I inform them its HTC’s ‘Desire’. For most people the very notion that other touchscreen smartphones can exist is a novel and alarming concept, the choice always seems to be iPhone or Blackberry, the latter being seen simply as things that can receive and send emails that wannabe City-slickers buy. I often end up having to explain that ‘iPhone’ is a subcategory of ‘smartphone’ - ‘iPhone’ does not equal ‘smartphone’. While this misconception is always slightly irritating, I can’t really blame people for it, after all Apple basically invented the concept of ‘smartphone’ as we think of it today. It was miles ahead of the competition when the first iPhone was released back in 2007, and because no real competitors came along for another two years, it unsurprisingly completely dominated the (non-business) high-end of the phone market. Consequently, for those who don’t show much of an interest in technology matters, seemingly almost everyone, except me, ‘iPhone’ is completely synonymous with ‘smartphone’.

However, two years ago Google decided that it didn’t want the future of the smartphone industry dominated by Apple, and so launched its own competitor called ‘Android’. It should be made clear that Android is an operating system (think Windows) and not a phone, whereas the term ‘iPhone’ really refers to both the hardware (the physical phone) and the operating system which runs on it called ‘iOS’; ‘OS’ being a generally used acronym for ‘operating system’, and the ‘i’ coming from Apple’s continuing love-affair with the vowel. When people talk about a phone they generally refer to the model and make, and not to the OS which is running on it. The majority of people have heard of Samsung, HTC, Motorola and Sony, but many do not know that each produces phones which run the Android OS. At the time of its launch Android didn’t bother Apple, but it has subsequently started to make them a bit jumpy, as an irritated Steve Jobs, the CEO and co-founder of Apple, said, “we didn’t go into search...They [Google] decided to compete with us”. And just a few weeks ago, Jobs went on a tirade about why the Apple business model was so much superior to anything else, with a few not so subtle jibes at Android thrown in to boot. This brings Apple’s sudden insecurities into question, and raises the issue of whether they are right in claiming that their strategy is superior to everyone else’s.

The reason for Apple’s sudden insecurities is quite simple, and it mainly revolves around the incredible growth of Android over the last two years. To see the current general trend, perhaps the most useful statistic is that of smartphone sales to end users. In the second quarter of 2009 only 1.8% of smartphones sold were running Android, but in the same quarter of 2010 this figure had jumped to 17.2%. This represents a staggering growth of 956% in a year. In terms of the overall market this puts Android ahead of iOS, which represented 14.2% of all devices sold, but behind RIM, Blackberry’s OS, and Symbian, Nokia’s OS, which were running on 18.2% and 41.2% of all devices sold respectively. Apple may draw encouragement from the fact that their market share has grown 1.2%, which would suggest that Android’s massive gains are coming from elsewhere, and indeed Symbian’s sales were down a significant 9.8%. But it seems likely that Apple’s growth of 1.2% would have been higher it if weren’t for Android. The smartphone market represents about 20% of the total phone market meaning that there is considerable room for growth, and on these trends it seems inevitable that Android will become the dominant mobile OS, and not iOS, and indeed Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniac very recently said as much.

The iPhone - the original smartphone?

In order to achieve this growth Google had to attract ‘developers’ - the people who write ‘apps’ for smartphone OS’s. As a result of Apple’s phenomenally successful ‘App Store’, any mobile OS which wants to compete with iOS needs to develop its own rival app store. Without apps which exploit the hardware capabilities of smartphones, an OS is seriously limited - apps are really what differentiate smartphones from normal phones. The problem is in order to get a lot of apps, there needs to be enough users of an OS to attract developers, and getting enough users without a good app store is difficult. In order to overcome this hurdle Google opted for a completely different strategy to Apple. Whereas iOS is proprietary and only runs on the iPhone, Android is completely open and free, meaning that any hardware manufacturer can decide to install it on their devices. This openness has been key to Android’s success, and has made it attractive to hardware manufacturers in two ways. First it was free, and quite simply a better OS then any of their own proprietary OS’s - it had the technical capability to compete with Apple’s iOS. Secondly, the likes of HTC would have known that other hardware manufacturers would also have been likely to adopt it. Thus, the potential customer base of Android would have been far greater than any of the manufacturers individually could have managed. As soon as a few key manufacturers were on board, primarily HTC and Samsung, Android snowballed. As it was adopted by more manufacturers, more people used it, and because more people used it, there was more incentive to develop apps for it. The more apps there are for an OS, the more attractive it becomes for consumers and consequently manufacturers, and so on.

This leads to the second question as to whether or not Apple’s ‘closed’ strategy is better than Google’s ‘open’ one. Predictably, both have their advantages and disadvantages. Apple’s strategy means that provided you are willing to buy into the Apple ‘eco-system’, via the App Store or iTunes for example, everything will work together seamlessly. The fact that Apple retains such tight control over everything means that things just tend to work easily and simply, but the downside is that what Apple says goes. If you want to sync music or video you will have to use iTunes (which for the majority of people with PCs is awful). The applications available, while high in number and quality, are strictly controlled by Apple and subsequently limited in their scope. For instance, it seems unlikely that the excellent new ‘Swype’ app (a text-input method which lets you slide from letter to letter rather than having to tap letters individually) will be approved for the app store, despite the fact that it is considerably quicker than traditional text-input methods. Similarly, if you want a mobile equivalent of the likes of Limewire (for non-copyright protected content, of course), then forget it. You will also be stuck with a pretty uncustomisable interface (rows of app icons), which is beginning to look pretty dated against some of the skinned versions of Android, and Microsoft's brand-new Windows Phone 7. And finally, of course there is only one real ‘choice’ of phone on offer, which is a bit of a dampener for those keen on individuality, or Blackberry-esque physical keyboards for that matter. Regarding the pros and cons of Android, you can pretty much swap the above around. It gives you a huge range of different types of phones to choose from, from the very high end to the low end, but this can have the effect that not all Android apps will work on all Android phones - something which would never happen on iOS. Its app marketplace lacks the quality and quantity of Apple’s (although it’s fast catching up in terms of quantity at least), but there are apps which have functionality which would simply not be allowed by Apple. There is also the benefit of having brilliant integration with Google’s excellent eco-system, for example Google Search, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Navigation amongst others. The whole Android set-up tends to be a bit cheaper as well, from the hardware through to the apps available on the market place.

The recent developments in the smartphone market have a striking similarity with the ‘PC war’ of the 90’s between the sworn enemies of Apple and Microsoft. Like today, Apple had a head start, and like today, it kept everything tightly integrated. By contrast, Microsoft enabled various hardware manufacturers to use Windows, just as Google is doing with Android: in the PC war Microsoft won. Admittedly Apple managed to corner a lucrative segment of the PC market and retain a loyal user base, but despite their protestations to the contrary, it is hard to believe that they would not prefer to be in Microsoft’s position. It is likely that Android will be the Windows of the smartphone world, leaving Apple with a relatively small, well, bite of the apple. Apple followers might well argue that that bite will be the juiciest, and they may have a point, but it seems that the days of Apple’s dominance over the high-end of the smartphone market are over.