Even though I am not currently an Android user I think it is very important to watch this platform develop. Why? As Jason Hiner points out many of the top Android apps can also be found in Apple’s App store which means the platform isn’t as important as the app or the task itself. Of the 20 listed apps, I have the following 13 on my iPhone:
- Google voice (not active in Canada)
- Dropbox
- Evernote
- Documents to Go
- Google Docs
- Tripit
- Amazon Kindle
- Google+
- Photoshop Express
- Audible
- Shazam
- Ted Air
- Google Places
Only 3 of the 20 are unique to the Android platform and I just don’t prefer the remaining 4 apps on Hiner’s list. It is very important to note that 17 of the 20 apps are available on the iPhone so this confirms that cross platform functionality of smartphones and their related tablets is fully established. Once again the best technology is the one that goes away and it doesn’t matter if you are using the iPhone or the Android you can do the same task on either.
I moved from iPhone to an Android to see what all the fuss was about and after 6 months I am a bit disappointed. The apps landscape is bleak over here in Android land, you never know if an app you download will cause instability on your phone (over 4 crashes and complete re-installs). The quality of the “android only” apps is very low and the hardware itself is low quality. That and the fragmentation of the app developers makes things difficult (i.e. the user interface for each app is different, so the back button on one app will take you back within the application itself and in a different app the back button will take you to the Android home page).
I am happy with the price though and I really don’t mind the Android platform itself and really like some of the differences that are present there. Too bad the dev community is so disjointed.