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Android Isn’t About Building a Mobile Platform

81 points by barredo 16y ago

TomOfTTB 16y ago
He's not wrong but I don't agree. Advertising is a form of payment not an end in itself. People still pay Google they just do it in attention which Google than turns into money by selling that attention to someone else. So to say Google isn't a platform company because they're really trying to control the ad market with their platform is like calling Microsoft a money company because they're trying to control the OS to sell Office. Also I don't think Google's best interest is in pushing the market away from "paid for software". If you're giving something away for free it helps you to have someone trying to sell it because you can get away with more. Google Docs is missing a ton of Office features but people rarely mention them because...it's free. So it's in their best interest to keep paid options around. If everyone was free they'd have to really compete.
- lukeschlather 16y ago
  The article said nothing about Google being a platform company, only that they're not looking to build a mobile platform in Android. A possibly more direct way of looking at this is that Android does not, from Google's perspective, compete with iOS. Google's intention is to make the same money whichever operating system the user is running, and Android only exists to enable new services that Apple moves to slow to allow (like Navigation.)
  - TomOfTTB 16y ago
    Right. I'm saying Google is a platform company (among other things) BECAUSE they're building a mobile platform. I'm disputing the fact that he doesn't think that. The logic I used is this... - Apple is a platform company because they charge people money for their platform - That defines a standard of "A platform company is a company that creates a platform and trades it for something of value [in Apple's case money]" - Google creates a platform [Android] - The only difference is Google's "something of value" is attention. They then trade that attention for money in the case of Ads So Google does compete with iOS. The only difference is they're deriving value differently (one directly from payment the other from Ads). But if someone buys an iPhone they aren't seeing the Ads Google's trying to deliver through Android and if someone buys an Android phone Apple isn't getting that person's money. So they're most certainly in competition (On your last point to say Google doesn't care what OS the user is running doesn't track for me. Apple has demonstrated their intention to dominate the iPhone "App Ad" market and muscle others out of it if they can)
    - lukeschlather 16y ago
      Android is not the platform Google is selling. Google Apps is the platform Google is selling. You can access Google Apps through an Android device, but Google doesn't make a meaningfully larger amount of money when you do than when you access Google Apps through any other means.
isopod 16y ago
FTA: This helps explain Google’s motivation for Android. Google could, of course, just extend their search advertising to mobile phones, Adsense for mobile devices and build mobile versions of their web applications so anyone can use them. That might make for a fine business, but it’d also be a rather weak position to be in compared to where Google is now. Phone makers could change the default search engine on their phones to something other than Google; mobile devices might change how people find information—they might switch away entirely from using a search engine, and in that case, Google would be dead in the water; or, worse, perhaps mobile devices could move people away from using advertising-supported web applications, and toward primarily using paid-for applications; in that case, Google would really be screwed. --- The thing is, Bing is already the default search on many phones, including Android/Droid phones on Verizon, who is ostensibly Google's partner.
- nod 16y ago
  Why do you quote this, what is your point? The article's next sentence continues just like your own: "But how are they going to make money from it? All of those things listed above could or are happening-" and goes on to further discussion.
- code_duck 16y ago
  Is it? My Verizon Droid phone came with Google as the browser's homepage. I haven't seen Bing once.
  - sandipc 16y ago
    As far as I know, Bing is the default on the Samsung Fascinate (Galaxy S) on Verizon, but not any other Verizon Android phones. And certainly not on the "Droid" series (which is distinct from Verizon's other Android offerings)...
  - ygtckr 16y ago
    I think even if they came with Bing as their default search engine, most of the users would switch it to Google. I think at least Google is thinking they would. How many of you chose Bing as your default search engine when you installed Google Chrome? I think some entrepreneurial mind can write articles on changing the default search engine on different phones, since I believe most of the people who doesn't know how to do it, will search how to change default search Samsung Fascinate
vessenes 16y ago
Intriguingly, he suggests that the Google App store kind of sucks because Google wants to push developers toward using advertising in apps, feeding their core business. In his argument Google doesn't really want awesome pay apps, they want awesome ad-supported apps that use AdMob. Interesting idea, and possibly true. I have so far considered the crappy Market to be a result of Google's internal algorithmic-search-is-better-than-human-editing approach, and their lateness to the game, and their subpar graphics performance for developers, and the comparatively poor UI culture at Google. Given all these complaints, it's amazing there's a market at all! If his take is true, then the worst thing the Android team did last year was screw up the patent situation on iAds. Mobile ads truly suck right now, the same sort of UI re-think that Google did in the late 1990s for web ads needs to be done on the mobile platform. So far, I think Apple is leading this charge.
- codingthewheel 16y ago
  How does the Android app store suck? And how is it amazing that there's an Android market at all--? Maybe this used to be the case. Speaking as a user of and developer for both iOS and Android devices, I think this argument is a little outdated. It just doesn't bear out in practice. I think this has become a mantra that iOS developers and users tell themselves because they think, wrongly, that Android poses a threat to them. It does not. Not to them. Anyway, it's usually easier to get an app released for Android, by far, than to release the equivalent app for iOS. Everything from the development language to the approval process conspires to make this so. (If you think you can get an Objective C app to market quicker than an equivalent programmer can get a Java app to market, you're either a genius or you're in for a rude awakening. Add App Store woes on top of that. Arbitrary bannings. And the like. These things matter. They cost you time and energy. And they're much more prevalent on iOS than Android.) What about the user being able to find, purchase, and download apps? It's painless on Android, and it's painless on iOS. Number of apps? There you may have a point. Android doesn't have the number of apps that iPhone has - merely tens of thousands rather than a hundred or two. And counting. Fragmentation. Eh. There's less of this than you might think. Developing for Android is very similar to developing for a PC. You're never 100% sure about the hardware you're running on, and yet, most PC applications manage to run just fine. This is what hardware abstraction is all about. Android does an excellent job of it, and most of the time, you program without worrying about the hardware. So while I think the author has some interesting observations about Google's larger strategy, the "Android app store is broken" argument doesn't really hold water anymore, at least not for me. If anything, Android apps are a breath of fresh air.
goodscreens 16y ago
Google isn't completely neglecting the app store, but the Android App Market is not as important to their revenue model as iTunes is for Apple. What's clearly in Google's interest is for people to discover mobile content through Google search.
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
It goes back to Spolsky's famous Strategy Letter V [1]: like so many successful companies before them, Google aims to commoditize the complement. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
ergo98 16y ago
I see little that is unique or insightful in this essay. "Google builds services like Google Maps, Gmail and Docs and gives them away for free"... ...because they entered a market where maps, email, and "docs" were free. Google didn't blaze a trail of free services, but they were bound to continue it. Nonetheless, they've managed to get lots of businesses to subscribe to the pay services though. "This is important for Google because while Google isn’t licensing Android" Aside from the fact that while the core Android image -- which is GPLd btw -- is free, Google's premium applications are not. Note that many low end devices don't have Google's applications. Google is also trying to monetize their leading edge advantage with the Nexus One originally, and now the Nexus S. "And Google conveniently owns one of the largest mobile advertising providers, Admob. " Yeah, so does Apple. How do you like them Apples? Apple is very heavily invested and involved in the advertising and the media sales market. Any illusion that Apple is a pure player just trying to honestly sell an electronic device and that's the conclusion of the transaction should be demolished the moment you hook it up to iTunes. The original purchase is merely the first of many monetizations of the customer. "Google is building Android not so they can make great mobile devices" Oh well if you say so. "For example, Android’s market may not be terrible in comparison to Apple’s App Store for paid applications just because Google hasn’t yet finished it; rather, discouraging paid applications on the Android platform is in Google’s interest. " Conspiracy theory. Google is simply really bad at some things. See Google Checkout -- which was actually a major contributor to the Market's problems -- and Google's retail efforts with the Nexus One. The Android Market is not great, but neither is it particularly terrible, and it has been rapidly improving. "This would squeeze out space for Apple in the mass market, forcing them into the high-end of the market, where people are willing to pay higher prices for a better device and experience." This is my favorite bit. Apple is a mass consumer electronics company, with products at every price point, usually representing the value option. This sort of casual allusion that it is the premium option is utter bunk, and instantly reveals the bias of the speaker. If Android succeeds, via competition, in putting price pressure on smartphones, you can be certain that Apple will be pushing down to the lower options just as quickly. Anyone who thinks otherwise has absolutely no business sense. Android is really a story about Linux. When people miss the Linux part of the equation -- and the decisions that are bound by it -- they instantly lose focus on some of the givens of the platform.
samd 16y ago
In other words, Google is a monopoly. Their strategy is to monopolize markets and charge artificially high prices for advertising. It's a weird sort of monopoly though, their users can go elsewhere, but their users are not their customers. Their customers are advertisers, and they are basically forced to use Google.
- dexen 16y ago
  Weren't there voices warning about that possibility back when Google was buying DoubleClick? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick#Acquisition_by_Google.2C_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick#Acquisition_by_Goog.... comes to mind In any case, what you wrote seems to confirm that Google is advertising company rather than general internet service company or web search company. Edit: in any case, Google, while having smaller revenue and market cap than Apple, seems to be able to put squeeze on the competitor exactly because it can leverage having large share of (advertising) market against Apple's medium share of (consumer electronics) market.
cincinnatus 16y ago
Amusing to think that Apple was criticized as being a "vertically integrated advertising agency" and Google really is one. Of course they want to increase eyeball traffic and ad impressions. It is also very clear to me that Android will be the most widely used mobile OS at the bottom end of the price structure, and therefor in the direct-revenue-per-subscriber numbers. So it makes sense that the apps that will do best there will be ad supported. The experience of the Angry Birds developers bear this out already.
panarky 16y ago
There's no big mystery here. If Google didn't build Android, the giants who control the platform could charge extortionate fees to let Google play. Same reason that Google buys spectrum, builds a browser, creates a TV set-top box, trades electricity wholesale, and builds municipal Wi-Fi and fiber networks. Google must do these things or other corporate behemoths will control their destiny.

81 points by barredo 16y ago

He's not wrong but I don't agree. Advertising is a form of payment not an end in itself. People still pay Google they just do it in attention which Google than turns into money by selling that attention to someone else. So to say Google isn't a platform company because they're really trying to control the ad market with their platform is like calling Microsoft a money company because they're trying to control the OS to sell Office. Also I don't think Google's best interest is in pushing the market away from "paid for software". If you're giving something away for free it helps you to have someone trying to sell it because you can get away with more. Google Docs is missing a ton of Office features but people rarely mention them because...it's free. So it's in their best interest to keep paid options around. If everyone was free they'd have to really compete.

lukeschlather 16y ago
The article said nothing about Google being a platform company, only that they're not looking to build a mobile platform in Android. A possibly more direct way of looking at this is that Android does not, from Google's perspective, compete with iOS. Google's intention is to make the same money whichever operating system the user is running, and Android only exists to enable new services that Apple moves to slow to allow (like Navigation.)
- TomOfTTB 16y ago
  Right. I'm saying Google is a platform company (among other things) BECAUSE they're building a mobile platform. I'm disputing the fact that he doesn't think that. The logic I used is this... - Apple is a platform company because they charge people money for their platform - That defines a standard of "A platform company is a company that creates a platform and trades it for something of value [in Apple's case money]" - Google creates a platform [Android] - The only difference is Google's "something of value" is attention. They then trade that attention for money in the case of Ads So Google does compete with iOS. The only difference is they're deriving value differently (one directly from payment the other from Ads). But if someone buys an iPhone they aren't seeing the Ads Google's trying to deliver through Android and if someone buys an Android phone Apple isn't getting that person's money. So they're most certainly in competition (On your last point to say Google doesn't care what OS the user is running doesn't track for me. Apple has demonstrated their intention to dominate the iPhone "App Ad" market and muscle others out of it if they can)
  - lukeschlather 16y ago
    Android is not the platform Google is selling. Google Apps is the platform Google is selling. You can access Google Apps through an Android device, but Google doesn't make a meaningfully larger amount of money when you do than when you access Google Apps through any other means.

isopod 16y ago

FTA: This helps explain Google’s motivation for Android. Google could, of course, just extend their search advertising to mobile phones, Adsense for mobile devices and build mobile versions of their web applications so anyone can use them. That might make for a fine business, but it’d also be a rather weak position to be in compared to where Google is now. Phone makers could change the default search engine on their phones to something other than Google; mobile devices might change how people find information—they might switch away entirely from using a search engine, and in that case, Google would be dead in the water; or, worse, perhaps mobile devices could move people away from using advertising-supported web applications, and toward primarily using paid-for applications; in that case, Google would really be screwed. --- The thing is, Bing is already the default search on many phones, including Android/Droid phones on Verizon, who is ostensibly Google's partner.

nod 16y ago
Why do you quote this, what is your point? The article's next sentence continues just like your own: "But how are they going to make money from it? All of those things listed above could or are happening-" and goes on to further discussion.
code_duck 16y ago
Is it? My Verizon Droid phone came with Google as the browser's homepage. I haven't seen Bing once.
- sandipc 16y ago
  As far as I know, Bing is the default on the Samsung Fascinate (Galaxy S) on Verizon, but not any other Verizon Android phones. And certainly not on the "Droid" series (which is distinct from Verizon's other Android offerings)...
- ygtckr 16y ago
  I think even if they came with Bing as their default search engine, most of the users would switch it to Google. I think at least Google is thinking they would. How many of you chose Bing as your default search engine when you installed Google Chrome? I think some entrepreneurial mind can write articles on changing the default search engine on different phones, since I believe most of the people who doesn't know how to do it, will search how to change default search Samsung Fascinate

vessenes 16y ago

Intriguingly, he suggests that the Google App store kind of sucks because Google wants to push developers toward using advertising in apps, feeding their core business. In his argument Google doesn't really want awesome pay apps, they want awesome ad-supported apps that use AdMob. Interesting idea, and possibly true. I have so far considered the crappy Market to be a result of Google's internal algorithmic-search-is-better-than-human-editing approach, and their lateness to the game, and their subpar graphics performance for developers, and the comparatively poor UI culture at Google. Given all these complaints, it's amazing there's a market at all! If his take is true, then the worst thing the Android team did last year was screw up the patent situation on iAds. Mobile ads truly suck right now, the same sort of UI re-think that Google did in the late 1990s for web ads needs to be done on the mobile platform. So far, I think Apple is leading this charge.

codingthewheel 16y ago
How does the Android app store suck? And how is it amazing that there's an Android market at all--? Maybe this used to be the case. Speaking as a user of and developer for both iOS and Android devices, I think this argument is a little outdated. It just doesn't bear out in practice. I think this has become a mantra that iOS developers and users tell themselves because they think, wrongly, that Android poses a threat to them. It does not. Not to them. Anyway, it's usually easier to get an app released for Android, by far, than to release the equivalent app for iOS. Everything from the development language to the approval process conspires to make this so. (If you think you can get an Objective C app to market quicker than an equivalent programmer can get a Java app to market, you're either a genius or you're in for a rude awakening. Add App Store woes on top of that. Arbitrary bannings. And the like. These things matter. They cost you time and energy. And they're much more prevalent on iOS than Android.) What about the user being able to find, purchase, and download apps? It's painless on Android, and it's painless on iOS. Number of apps? There you may have a point. Android doesn't have the number of apps that iPhone has - merely tens of thousands rather than a hundred or two. And counting. Fragmentation. Eh. There's less of this than you might think. Developing for Android is very similar to developing for a PC. You're never 100% sure about the hardware you're running on, and yet, most PC applications manage to run just fine. This is what hardware abstraction is all about. Android does an excellent job of it, and most of the time, you program without worrying about the hardware. So while I think the author has some interesting observations about Google's larger strategy, the "Android app store is broken" argument doesn't really hold water anymore, at least not for me. If anything, Android apps are a breath of fresh air.

goodscreens 16y ago

Google isn't completely neglecting the app store, but the Android App Market is not as important to their revenue model as iTunes is for Apple. What's clearly in Google's interest is for people to discover mobile content through Google search.

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

It goes back to Spolsky's famous Strategy Letter V [1]: like so many successful companies before them, Google aims to commoditize the complement. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

ergo98 16y ago

I see little that is unique or insightful in this essay. "Google builds services like Google Maps, Gmail and Docs and gives them away for free"... ...because they entered a market where maps, email, and "docs" were free. Google didn't blaze a trail of free services, but they were bound to continue it. Nonetheless, they've managed to get lots of businesses to subscribe to the pay services though. "This is important for Google because while Google isn’t licensing Android" Aside from the fact that while the core Android image -- which is GPLd btw -- is free, Google's premium applications are not. Note that many low end devices don't have Google's applications. Google is also trying to monetize their leading edge advantage with the Nexus One originally, and now the Nexus S. "And Google conveniently owns one of the largest mobile advertising providers, Admob. " Yeah, so does Apple. How do you like them Apples? Apple is very heavily invested and involved in the advertising and the media sales market. Any illusion that Apple is a pure player just trying to honestly sell an electronic device and that's the conclusion of the transaction should be demolished the moment you hook it up to iTunes. The original purchase is merely the first of many monetizations of the customer. "Google is building Android not so they can make great mobile devices" Oh well if you say so. "For example, Android’s market may not be terrible in comparison to Apple’s App Store for paid applications just because Google hasn’t yet finished it; rather, discouraging paid applications on the Android platform is in Google’s interest. " Conspiracy theory. Google is simply really bad at some things. See Google Checkout -- which was actually a major contributor to the Market's problems -- and Google's retail efforts with the Nexus One. The Android Market is not great, but neither is it particularly terrible, and it has been rapidly improving. "This would squeeze out space for Apple in the mass market, forcing them into the high-end of the market, where people are willing to pay higher prices for a better device and experience." This is my favorite bit. Apple is a mass consumer electronics company, with products at every price point, usually representing the value option. This sort of casual allusion that it is the premium option is utter bunk, and instantly reveals the bias of the speaker. If Android succeeds, via competition, in putting price pressure on smartphones, you can be certain that Apple will be pushing down to the lower options just as quickly. Anyone who thinks otherwise has absolutely no business sense. Android is really a story about Linux. When people miss the Linux part of the equation -- and the decisions that are bound by it -- they instantly lose focus on some of the givens of the platform.

samd 16y ago

In other words, Google is a monopoly. Their strategy is to monopolize markets and charge artificially high prices for advertising. It's a weird sort of monopoly though, their users can go elsewhere, but their users are not their customers. Their customers are advertisers, and they are basically forced to use Google.

dexen 16y ago
Weren't there voices warning about that possibility back when Google was buying DoubleClick? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick#Acquisition_by_Google.2C_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick#Acquisition_by_Goog.... comes to mind In any case, what you wrote seems to confirm that Google is advertising company rather than general internet service company or web search company. Edit: in any case, Google, while having smaller revenue and market cap than Apple, seems to be able to put squeeze on the competitor exactly because it can leverage having large share of (advertising) market against Apple's medium share of (consumer electronics) market.

cincinnatus 16y ago

Amusing to think that Apple was criticized as being a "vertically integrated advertising agency" and Google really is one. Of course they want to increase eyeball traffic and ad impressions. It is also very clear to me that Android will be the most widely used mobile OS at the bottom end of the price structure, and therefor in the direct-revenue-per-subscriber numbers. So it makes sense that the apps that will do best there will be ad supported. The experience of the Angry Birds developers bear this out already.

panarky 16y ago

There's no big mystery here. If Google didn't build Android, the giants who control the platform could charge extortionate fees to let Google play. Same reason that Google buys spectrum, builds a browser, creates a TV set-top box, trades electricity wholesale, and builds municipal Wi-Fi and fiber networks. Google must do these things or other corporate behemoths will control their destiny.