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Why Google’s Android is a great OS

According to projections by the research firm, IDC, by the end of 2011, Google’s Android operating system platform will have 40 percent of the global market of mobile devices, and the platform of Apple’s operating system, iOS, will have less than 16 percent of the market.

Surprised? Don’t be.

More and more companies, and more and more people, continue to invest in devices that run on Android and Android applications, or software programs, since Google and the other members of the Open-Handset Alliance unveiled Android in 2007.

Android’s mascot in its advertising campaigns may be a droid, but its proponents often cite the desire to be able to download applications for their handset and/or tablet at will as the reason why they have abandoned devices running Apple’s operating system, iOS, in favor of Android devices.

To date, users of Apple devices are barred from downloading applications that aren’t sourced from Apple’s own Appstore, which sells software programs to use on its devices at its discretion, usually for $.99 to $9.99. (Some apps are free.) Apple has refused to vend independent developers’ apps based on considerations such as app content involving explicit sexuality.

Google’s Android Market offers more than 200 thousand software applications for free, and does not reject independent developers’ apps.

The Android operating system was created as an open and open-source software platform under an Apache license. The Android philosophy is about freedom and choice. “The purpose of Android is to promote openness in the mobile world,” according to Google, Inc., “[and] to make sure that there would always be an open platform available for carriers, original equipment manufacturers, and developers to use to make their innovative ideas a reality.”

As a result, mobile companies around the world are able to adapt aspects of Google’s operating system to make it suitable for use in their mobile devices, and numerous companies have marketed devices that run Android, which accounts for Google’s continuing mobile marketing success.

Champions of Apple’s products say that Apple devices’ user interface is more user-friendly, and that its apps run more smoothly than Androids’, because Apple’s operating system is designed to interact specifically with the hardware in Apple’s devices, while Android is being adopted in devices that were originally designed to use a different operating system.

However, Google and Android’s developers have gracefully side-stepped the possibility of incompatibilities by implementing an Android Compatibility Program in which all device builders are required to participate during the process of making Android-friendly devices.

Many mobile companies that have developed Android phones are introducing tablets that will run the newly introduced Android 3.0 and will be competing with Apple’s iPad 2 and iOS 4 when they come out later this year.

So far, Android applications have fared better in the transition from handset to tablet. Consumers who use both iOS and Android devices have complained that Apple app icons lose resolution as application images simply stretch to fill the larger screens of tablets, but praise Android’s apps for keeping icons’ original resolutions, and instead increasing the space between apps’ visual elements. Android tablet users also happily report that they have increased space in Android’s widget menu, which runs along the top of the screen of Android devices.

Even if Android’s products are a little behind Apple’s in terms of functionality, Android devices, which are already close in price to those of Apple devices, will drop in price as more choices are added to the market this year. Add to that all of Android’s free applications, and you can be sure that Android devices are a better product for your money.

Contact Ariel Senko at communitarian@mail.dccc.edu

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