6 ms·

Who is Android's customer?

26 points by dkasper 17y ago

s3graham 17y ago
> Google really needs to focus on building out the user experience so that average users can pickup the phone and don't want to put it down. I think it's pretty clear that this is what Google itself is focusing on. The built in apps are, by most accounts, pretty slick. Additionally, while people might not be clamoring for "multitasking" by name, they do want features like "my X program keeps working while I check the web", etc., so that's a bit off. I guess what's lacking for that to be an Android strength, is the 3rd party app that you absolutely positively want running in the BG.
cantastoria 17y ago
Google was stupid to release the Nexus One. They created a fragmented developer environment, stabbed Android licensees in the back and terrified carriers all in fell swoop. They're going to have to work very hard to get the industry to trust them again. It may already be too late.
- FooBarWidget 17y ago
  I don't think so. None of this would have happened if the manufacturers and carriers didn't fuck up. Google's Nexus One might very well save the platform by serving as an example of how things should be done.
  - kylec 17y ago
    Here's hoping that they keep the device updated like Apple does with the iPhone (unlike HTC/T-Mobile with the G1 that's still stuck on Android 1.6). One of the reasons why I like buying Apple is because they continue to add value after the sale.
    - cantastoria 17y ago
      I wouldn't count on this from Google. The release of the Nexus shows they have a very muddled strategy as far as Android goes. It looks like they thought they could pull off some of Microsofts' old tricks but Android is open source and they had no way of keeping the handset makers from messing with it. The Nexus is a retreat from this strategy.
  - qeorge 17y ago
    None of this would have happened if the manufacturers and carriers didn't fuck up. Is this to suggest Google wouldn't have released a phone if they were more impressed with the G1, Droid, et all? There's been "G Phone" rumors for at least 2 years. It is an interesting thought, though. What is your basis?
- eli 17y ago
  How does it fragment the environment any more than the release of any new Android phone?
  - cantastoria 17y ago
    Imagine if Microsoft had released a "Microsoft PC"? Why would anyone buy anything else? If you're a Android licensee now you're forced to differentiate whether you want to or not because you have to compete against the favored Nexus. The Android dev environment was destined to be a fractured mess to begin with. The Nexus just sped up the process.
    - eli 17y ago
      I still don't see how that has anything to do with fragmenting the platform. If anything, a semi-official reference device would work to unify the platform around that implementation, no?
      - cantastoria 17y ago
        Why would HTC and Motorola follow the Nexus? What's in it for them? As far as they were concerned the whole point of Android was that there was no reference implementation. If the start looking to the Nexus as a reference implementation all they get is to become box makers for Google's software. As an Android developer, if you want to cover the whole market, you're now going to have to deal with handset makers at war with the developer of the platform. I can't see how the Nexus provides anything but more motivation for Android licensees to make their products significantly different from what Google is offering.
        theBobMcCormick 17y ago
        > Why would HTC and Motorola follow the Nexus? What's in it for them? Considering HTC makes the Nexus, I think it's pretty clear what's in it for them. :-)
    - dannyr 17y ago
- blasdel 17y ago
  They should have made the Nexus One, but as Android's iPod Touch: low markup, no cell modem, faster hardware. It was pretty moronic of them to pull a Zune, especially when their partners making iPod touch competitors are fucking things up even more than their phone manufacturers.
haseman 17y ago
Google already has a strange split concept of 'users' and 'customers' when it comes to online advertising. I imagine they can split the concept further when it comes to handset manufacturing. That aside, this is _the_ issue of the Android platform. Apple knows that their 'customers' are the people who purchase the device and not their developers (as any developer who's gone through the approval process will tell you). The question remains...can Google make the same leap?
pragmatic 17y ago
Uh, my brother, brother-in-law and about everyone I know that's contract has expired since the droid came out. There are places where iPhones just aren't offered/don't work well. Here, the competition is more for the BlackBerry market.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  There are places where iPhones just aren't offered/don't work well. Yes, but do you know what? That advantage of the Android platform is entirely temporary, as the original article hints at near the end: As Apple expands to other carriers in the US it will be even more clear the massively better product they have for consumers. We're just waiting for that shoe to drop. It's not as if Steve Jobs does not know, probably down to the second, exactly how long Apple's exclusive contract with AT&T will last in the USA. Nor does it seem likely that Verizon and T-Mobile -- however eagerly they appear to have clutched Apple's competitors to their breasts in the short run -- will hesitate for a nanosecond to augment their current offerings with the iPhone if that will earn them additional money.
  - netcan 17y ago
    I think it might be a mistake to assume that the iPhone is even aiming for ipod-like market share. Soon the smartphone market will virtually disappear and replaced by the phone market. Do we really think that Apple will own the lion's share of the phone market? I think a mac-like strategy is more likely: Apple take a big, juicy, high margin chunk of exactly the piece of the market they want. All the other phones will need some sort of OS too.
    - mechanical_fish 17y ago
      All the other phones will need some sort of OS too. Absolutely. And from what little I've seen of how the Android market has played out so far, this might as well be Google's official mission statement. But this is what the original article is about. "The people who aren't well-served by Apple" is a large market, and is always likely to be a viable market. But it is a terribly fragmented market, and it has an ephemeral definition to boot.
narag 17y ago
Maybe Google doesn't want to "win" right now. If it needs applications, it seems logical to create a device targetted at the people that can write them. In three or four years, equivalent hardware will cost peanuts...
jsz0 17y ago
I'm not sure there's any one type of customer for Android. Google is throwing a lot out there right now. It's still fundamentally a platform and not a product. For what Android is lacking in fit & finish is nothing compared to the feature set. Integration with Google Voice is going to be huge in the future. It's just too compelling of a service not to be a huge success. Hardware choice is important because there's no one-size-fits-all. People have different requirements. For example we'll almost certainly see a hardened Android phone without a camera for professions where this is an absolute requirement. Apple is a non-player there. Small market? Sure but when you add up a bunch of small markets you get something big. For the mainstream consumer market I think the iPhone's App advantage, specifically games, is going to keep Apple in really good shape for a while. It's RIM/Microsoft/Palm/Nokia who have the most to lose here. I think from Apple's perspective, if they could choose their primary competitor going forward, they would happily pick Google over the others because in the end Google doesn't really care if you're using their services on an iPhone or an Android phone.
jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
Your mainstream user does not give two shits about "open-ness" and apps running in the background. Odds are they think the iPhone does already, especially with push notifications. It is a nice alternative to the iPhone on carriers that don't have it the iPhone yet, but that's certainly not a position of strength. The iPhone will be on other carriers and at that point the iPhone will almost always win out. Android is a nice second best to the iPhone. Price is irrelevant too. There's already a $99 iPhone, so what are they going to do, lower the Android phones to $50? Even at that point, the iPhone is still worth $50 more. I think palm tried this with the Pixi, the Pre, or the Pez. Yeah, that worked out well. Go lower than $50 and you're out of smartphone territory. Oh an unlocked phone? Your mainstream users do not give a shit, especially when it costs $538. Everyone is trying to be Apple, no one is trying to BEAT them.
- dannyr 17y ago
  "Oh an unlocked phone? Your mainstream users do not give a shit, especially when it costs $538." A very narrow view of the phone market. The phone market is not only the US. Unlocked phones are widespread in other parts of the world.
- theBobMcCormick 17y ago
  Even second place in the cell phone market is not a bad chunk of change. Everyone keeps talking about whether or not Android will beat iPhone. They seem to be ignoring the fact that there are still a lot of $$$ being spent on other smartphones (WinMo, BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm, etc). Even if Android never beats iPhone, there's still a lot of users and a lot of money for them to hoover up.
gvb 17y ago
Google is Android's customer. Before Android, the phone market was either screwed up locked down "smart" phones produced by the carriers or the iPhone which is tightly controlled by Apple. Aggravating the iPhone option, AT&T has a lock on the iPhone, freezing out the other carriers. Without shaking things up, Google had little market for serving mobile ads. Nobody did Google-style searching -> web browsing on the screwed up "smartphones" and Google is at the mercy of Apple (to some extent) on the iPhone. With Android, Google is shaking things up and getting their opportunities (in spades) to serve ads to mobile browsers. The carriers saw iPhone as the major threat that it is, saw their smartphones losing popularity as people realized how poor their UI was, and still were paying lots of money for the smartphone software. AT&T has the iPhone locked up (for now), so Android is the only way for them to be competitive. Google did the "white knight" on the phone ecosystem: they offered the carriers software competitive with the iPhone and offered the phone manufacturers free software that didn't suck for development and didn't suck for UI. While neither is probably real happy with the leverage Google has over them and the disruption that Google is doing in their industry, the alternatives with Symbian or Windows Mobile is worse and more expensive to boot.
koepked 17y ago
Maybe there is no customer, not yet. I suspect that right now, Android isn't much more than market research. It's talked about all the time here: release early, iterate often. Google's initial choice for a market was the geeks, and with the Android, they've given us much capability with minimal restrictions. The geeks are going to determine Android's customer, when we collectively figure out what the best uses are for what I consider to be the first true general purpose computer that fits in my pocket.

26 points by dkasper 17y ago

> Google really needs to focus on building out the user experience so that average users can pickup the phone and don't want to put it down. I think it's pretty clear that this is what Google itself is focusing on. The built in apps are, by most accounts, pretty slick. Additionally, while people might not be clamoring for "multitasking" by name, they do want features like "my X program keeps working while I check the web", etc., so that's a bit off. I guess what's lacking for that to be an Android strength, is the 3rd party app that you absolutely positively want running in the BG.

cantastoria 17y ago

Google was stupid to release the Nexus One. They created a fragmented developer environment, stabbed Android licensees in the back and terrified carriers all in fell swoop. They're going to have to work very hard to get the industry to trust them again. It may already be too late.

FooBarWidget 17y ago
I don't think so. None of this would have happened if the manufacturers and carriers didn't fuck up. Google's Nexus One might very well save the platform by serving as an example of how things should be done.
- kylec 17y ago
  Here's hoping that they keep the device updated like Apple does with the iPhone (unlike HTC/T-Mobile with the G1 that's still stuck on Android 1.6). One of the reasons why I like buying Apple is because they continue to add value after the sale.
  - cantastoria 17y ago
    I wouldn't count on this from Google. The release of the Nexus shows they have a very muddled strategy as far as Android goes. It looks like they thought they could pull off some of Microsofts' old tricks but Android is open source and they had no way of keeping the handset makers from messing with it. The Nexus is a retreat from this strategy.
- qeorge 17y ago
  None of this would have happened if the manufacturers and carriers didn't fuck up. Is this to suggest Google wouldn't have released a phone if they were more impressed with the G1, Droid, et all? There's been "G Phone" rumors for at least 2 years. It is an interesting thought, though. What is your basis?
eli 17y ago
How does it fragment the environment any more than the release of any new Android phone?
- cantastoria 17y ago
  Imagine if Microsoft had released a "Microsoft PC"? Why would anyone buy anything else? If you're a Android licensee now you're forced to differentiate whether you want to or not because you have to compete against the favored Nexus. The Android dev environment was destined to be a fractured mess to begin with. The Nexus just sped up the process.
  - eli 17y ago
    I still don't see how that has anything to do with fragmenting the platform. If anything, a semi-official reference device would work to unify the platform around that implementation, no?
    - cantastoria 17y ago
      Why would HTC and Motorola follow the Nexus? What's in it for them? As far as they were concerned the whole point of Android was that there was no reference implementation. If the start looking to the Nexus as a reference implementation all they get is to become box makers for Google's software. As an Android developer, if you want to cover the whole market, you're now going to have to deal with handset makers at war with the developer of the platform. I can't see how the Nexus provides anything but more motivation for Android licensees to make their products significantly different from what Google is offering.
      - theBobMcCormick 17y ago
        > Why would HTC and Motorola follow the Nexus? What's in it for them? Considering HTC makes the Nexus, I think it's pretty clear what's in it for them. :-)
  - dannyr 17y ago
blasdel 17y ago
They should have made the Nexus One, but as Android's iPod Touch: low markup, no cell modem, faster hardware. It was pretty moronic of them to pull a Zune, especially when their partners making iPod touch competitors are fucking things up even more than their phone manufacturers.

haseman 17y ago

Google already has a strange split concept of 'users' and 'customers' when it comes to online advertising. I imagine they can split the concept further when it comes to handset manufacturing. That aside, this is _the_ issue of the Android platform. Apple knows that their 'customers' are the people who purchase the device and not their developers (as any developer who's gone through the approval process will tell you). The question remains...can Google make the same leap?

pragmatic 17y ago

Uh, my brother, brother-in-law and about everyone I know that's contract has expired since the droid came out. There are places where iPhones just aren't offered/don't work well. Here, the competition is more for the BlackBerry market.

mechanical_fish 17y ago
There are places where iPhones just aren't offered/don't work well. Yes, but do you know what? That advantage of the Android platform is entirely temporary, as the original article hints at near the end: As Apple expands to other carriers in the US it will be even more clear the massively better product they have for consumers. We're just waiting for that shoe to drop. It's not as if Steve Jobs does not know, probably down to the second, exactly how long Apple's exclusive contract with AT&T will last in the USA. Nor does it seem likely that Verizon and T-Mobile -- however eagerly they appear to have clutched Apple's competitors to their breasts in the short run -- will hesitate for a nanosecond to augment their current offerings with the iPhone if that will earn them additional money.
- netcan 17y ago
  I think it might be a mistake to assume that the iPhone is even aiming for ipod-like market share. Soon the smartphone market will virtually disappear and replaced by the phone market. Do we really think that Apple will own the lion's share of the phone market? I think a mac-like strategy is more likely: Apple take a big, juicy, high margin chunk of exactly the piece of the market they want. All the other phones will need some sort of OS too.
  - mechanical_fish 17y ago
    All the other phones will need some sort of OS too. Absolutely. And from what little I've seen of how the Android market has played out so far, this might as well be Google's official mission statement. But this is what the original article is about. "The people who aren't well-served by Apple" is a large market, and is always likely to be a viable market. But it is a terribly fragmented market, and it has an ephemeral definition to boot.

narag 17y ago

Maybe Google doesn't want to "win" right now. If it needs applications, it seems logical to create a device targetted at the people that can write them. In three or four years, equivalent hardware will cost peanuts...

jsz0 17y ago

I'm not sure there's any one type of customer for Android. Google is throwing a lot out there right now. It's still fundamentally a platform and not a product. For what Android is lacking in fit & finish is nothing compared to the feature set. Integration with Google Voice is going to be huge in the future. It's just too compelling of a service not to be a huge success. Hardware choice is important because there's no one-size-fits-all. People have different requirements. For example we'll almost certainly see a hardened Android phone without a camera for professions where this is an absolute requirement. Apple is a non-player there. Small market? Sure but when you add up a bunch of small markets you get something big. For the mainstream consumer market I think the iPhone's App advantage, specifically games, is going to keep Apple in really good shape for a while. It's RIM/Microsoft/Palm/Nokia who have the most to lose here. I think from Apple's perspective, if they could choose their primary competitor going forward, they would happily pick Google over the others because in the end Google doesn't really care if you're using their services on an iPhone or an Android phone.

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

Your mainstream user does not give two shits about "open-ness" and apps running in the background. Odds are they think the iPhone does already, especially with push notifications. It is a nice alternative to the iPhone on carriers that don't have it the iPhone yet, but that's certainly not a position of strength. The iPhone will be on other carriers and at that point the iPhone will almost always win out. Android is a nice second best to the iPhone. Price is irrelevant too. There's already a $99 iPhone, so what are they going to do, lower the Android phones to $50? Even at that point, the iPhone is still worth $50 more. I think palm tried this with the Pixi, the Pre, or the Pez. Yeah, that worked out well. Go lower than $50 and you're out of smartphone territory. Oh an unlocked phone? Your mainstream users do not give a shit, especially when it costs $538. Everyone is trying to be Apple, no one is trying to BEAT them.

dannyr 17y ago
"Oh an unlocked phone? Your mainstream users do not give a shit, especially when it costs $538." A very narrow view of the phone market. The phone market is not only the US. Unlocked phones are widespread in other parts of the world.
theBobMcCormick 17y ago
Even second place in the cell phone market is not a bad chunk of change. Everyone keeps talking about whether or not Android will beat iPhone. They seem to be ignoring the fact that there are still a lot of $$$ being spent on other smartphones (WinMo, BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm, etc). Even if Android never beats iPhone, there's still a lot of users and a lot of money for them to hoover up.

gvb 17y ago

Google is Android's customer. Before Android, the phone market was either screwed up locked down "smart" phones produced by the carriers or the iPhone which is tightly controlled by Apple. Aggravating the iPhone option, AT&T has a lock on the iPhone, freezing out the other carriers. Without shaking things up, Google had little market for serving mobile ads. Nobody did Google-style searching -> web browsing on the screwed up "smartphones" and Google is at the mercy of Apple (to some extent) on the iPhone. With Android, Google is shaking things up and getting their opportunities (in spades) to serve ads to mobile browsers. The carriers saw iPhone as the major threat that it is, saw their smartphones losing popularity as people realized how poor their UI was, and still were paying lots of money for the smartphone software. AT&T has the iPhone locked up (for now), so Android is the only way for them to be competitive. Google did the "white knight" on the phone ecosystem: they offered the carriers software competitive with the iPhone and offered the phone manufacturers free software that didn't suck for development and didn't suck for UI. While neither is probably real happy with the leverage Google has over them and the disruption that Google is doing in their industry, the alternatives with Symbian or Windows Mobile is worse and more expensive to boot.

koepked 17y ago

Maybe there is no customer, not yet. I suspect that right now, Android isn't much more than market research. It's talked about all the time here: release early, iterate often. Google's initial choice for a market was the geeks, and with the Android, they've given us much capability with minimal restrictions. The geeks are going to determine Android's customer, when we collectively figure out what the best uses are for what I consider to be the first true general purpose computer that fits in my pocket.