09 July 2011, 8:00 AM
(3 days 3 hours ago.)
Too many custom UIs is one of Android's problems
The rise and rise of Google's Android operating system has become the stuff of legend. Thanks to support from a broad range of handset makers and missteps by key rivals, Android has cemented its position as the industry's best hope to counter the continuing strength of Apple's iOS juggernaut. But could the fast-growing Android be on the way to becoming its own worst enemy?
From the sales figures, this might seem like a silly question. Strong support for Android has proved so successful for one-time smartphone OEM HTC that the company is now valued at more than Nokia and Research In Motion (RIM), two erstwhile competitors that have had to embark on a prolonged campaign of soul-searching in the face of the combined Android-iOS assault. RIM has placed two bob each way, promoting its own platform but adding Android support to its recently-launched PlayBook tablet, while Nokia startlingly jumped ship to embrace Windows Phone 7 rather than reinforce Symbian in the face of Android's assault.
Indeed, recent Gartner figures suggest nothing but blue sky for Android, which is expected to account for 49% of the fast-growing smartphone market by next year, with projected sales of 310.1 million devices – up from 67.2m last year. Price will prove particularly helpful, with the operating system's favourable licensing terms allowing vendors to focus on design innovation and price-point stratification.
Telstra led this trend in March with the launch of its $99 ZTE Smart-Touch, and by 2015 Gartner is projecting that two-thirds of devices will have an average selling price of $US300 or less – "proving that smartphones have been finally truly democratised", in the words of principal analyst Roberta Cozza.
Yet there is much more to smartphone success than sheer device numbers: Nokia knows this all too well, with its Symbian-based devices continuing to outsell those of competitors but representing a smaller and smaller margin opportunity for the company as it is picked off at the high end and marginalised at the low.
Apple continues to turn in record earnings, largely on the back of its iPad and continuing iPhone successes – and these, in turn, are held by many to be driven by the runaway application ecosystem that has allowed iPhones and iPads to be used for anything developers can dream. And while Google may have posted strong numbers in its own Android Market, its democratic, free-for-all approach hasn't necessarily been without its problems.
The penetration of malware-carrying Android apps, for example, was once a theoretical risk but became such a real problem that in March, Google was forced to remove 58 different apps that had already been downloaded onto 260,000 Android devices. These apps exploited a weakness in Android to grant themselves root access and engage in all sorts of nasty behaviour.
Google has responded by enabling a 'remote kill' option that will allow it to uninstall such apps from users' phones without any intervention by the user – but that feature will only be available when telcos provide it through an operating system update.
Indeed, the growing market strength of the world's telcos has proved to be another hiccup in Google's master plan. One of the biggest problems with Apple's iPhone was that it offered no way for telcos to offer customers their own service; Apple was using telcos to move its device and sell its services to their customers, but they were reduced to mere messengers. This was a major problem for the likes of Telstra, which wanted customers but also wanted to steer those customers towards its own movie, music and other content services.
Android's openness has allowed telcos to value-add by creating their own apps and interfaces to complementary services, but this approach has created a nightmare scenario of different device configurations, carrier-locked phones and services, and inflexibility that many see as being anathema to Google's early messages of openness.
Popular hacks of Android such as CyanogenMod, LeeDrOid (and its Australian-developed T-Mod variant for Telstra phones), MoDaCo, MIUI and DeFroST – ironically, made possible by the same root-level access techniques that allowed the recent malware attacks – are providing new options for users disgruntled at the level of 'crapware' on their new Android phones.
This trend reflects both the best and worst of the Android model – its openness, and the fact that so many interested parties see that openness as a way to assert their own kind of control on their customers. This will be OK (and, in fact, appreciated by) many customers but there's always the chance it could become a hindrance for Android if fragmentation and diversification becomes too widespread.
Android's market onslaught is helping carriers target the low end, but will there be too many compromises? These sorts of issues may be expected in a continually evolving ecosystem, but they may also make the top-down controls imposed on Apple's App Store seem far more appealing. Predictability of the user experience has direct implications for Android developers, who need to be confident they are participating in an application market that's seen to be home to high-quality apps – rather than being a garage-sale grab bag where long-lost Renaissance masterpieces are buried in mountains of junk. Stung too often, less-than-rabidly-enthusiastic users may well flee to the predictable user experience (and hundreds of thousands of apps) the iPhone, iPad and App Store provide.
This risk is heightened by the ability for users to buy Android apps from a multitude of places – most recently, through Amazon's Appstore for Android, which offers an alternative source of Android apps and encourages visits by offering a normally-paid app for free each day. This sort of structure certainly fulfils Google's democratisation ideals, but it adds complexity to an app ecosystem in which developers face more choices than ever as they try to recoup and profit from their investment in time and energy.
As a decidedly moving target, Google's effort to democratise the smartphone and tablet is without precedent – and nobody knows how it's going to end up. " ’Open' is a funny word," says Geoff Bruckner, director of local development house OzDroid."
As a developer, you need to work much more closely with the hardware [on Android devices] than you would on iOS, which has its advantages and disadvantages. Google is doing to the mobile phone market what Microsoft and IBM did to the PC – turning them into commodities – and I'm pleased with where Android has gone so far."
Early indications are that both developers and the market in general are pleased with Android's latest extension – into the fast-growing market for tablets. Motorola's Xoom began shipping from Telstra last month, and the entrance of contenders like Acer's Iconia A500 and Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 have ensured that the tablet market remains an epicentre of activity this year.
Developers are certain to follow – especially if Google eventually brings Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) source code to public release – and early positive reaction suggests Android-powered tablets could become a significant contributor to Android's established momentum. As the market saw with the iPad, the ability to build apps for significantly larger screens offers major benefits for developers, as well as pressuring them to boost their design and development standards because tablet-using consumers expect more from their apps.
Google's relaxed App Store policies have enabled competition to thrive, but they've also allowed malware to creep through and complicate the distribution story for developers.
While tablets will be a significant focus for the rest of the year, they complicate the picture for Google, which has broadened the complexity of its OS and needs to work with device-makers to add new capabilities such as near field communication (NFC).
NFC, widely understood to be both planned and not planned for Apple's still-mythical iPhone 5, is also expected in Android devices and offers great promise for developers as a new form of sensor for application interactions – but it must be done right, if at all. A technology most often linked to innovations like cashless wallets must be tied to an infallible transaction processing infrastructure – and the risk of intended malware residing on users' phones is hardly the kind of thing to instil confidence.
This, then, is the fundamental problem facing Android: it's growing fast, and needs to be managed to ensure it delivers on the user experience, application promise and flexibility that it was always meant to deliver. It has grown by leaps and bounds since SDK 1.0 was released in September 2008 – less than three years ago – but it's being updated all the time.
We explore areas where Android is currently under the most pressure to deliver – and weigh up their prospects from the developer perspective. As they illustrate, one thing is for sure: there's a lot on the horizon.
If Google can keep Android on message; stop telco and application interests from diluting its structure and effectiveness; deftly manage what is effectively a code fork with the release of Honeycomb; keep developers interested, engaged and compensated for their enthusiasm; and do so while fighting off Apple's iOS and a renewed attack from RIM – only then will Google be able to truly help Android realise its very real, very extensive potential.
Android developers will need to incorporate significant new technologies into their apps.
Ask a developer what they like about Android, and many are likely to mention the fact that it's so versatile.
Nowhere is this more evident than when perusing the features list of new versions: 2.3 (Gingerbread), for example, offered a major step forward by adding support for contactless (NFC), gyroscopes, barometers, and other types of sensors while version 3 (Honeycomb) added support for multi-core processors and the efficiency improvements they provide for tablet users.
For developers, the explicit addition of these features is a harbinger of things to come – particularly in terms of NFC, which promises a completely new form of data entry.
Contactless data entry has achieved something of a Holy Grail status for many developers, who until now have had to make do with photographing barcodes in order for Android devices to parse structured information from their surrounds.
By providing support for NFC, future devices will gain important new capabilities – most prominently, the ability to use a smartphone as a transport ticket or 'digital wallet' identified to a contactless payment terminal. Making these services work takes far more than just adding an NFC tag, however: all devices, whether Android, iOS or other operating system, will need an interface into a supporting payments ecosystem that makes them able to complete a payment.
These interfaces will, naturally, be tightly controlled by banking institutions – and therefore may be largely irrelevant for developers in the short term, unless those institutions can bundle the authentication process and allow for the movement of money to and from Android mobile apps.
Properly authenticated apps might eventually be able to get credentialed access to 'wallet' elements, but home developers are likely to be frozen out of those ecosystems in the near term.
"Payments have to be offline," says 'Hank', one of many Android developers who has been thinking about where NFC might be applied outside of those payment ecosystems and has watched early contactless payment trials like the recent Telstra-NAB-Visa trial.
"To verify an identity offline, secret keys are stored on 'secure elements' like the SIM card," he continues. "This involves expensive hardware and competition for the one SIM card slot – which is solved by SIMs with the telco's and Visa's secret keys on them. Why not take advantage of everyone being distracted by NFC payments and work on revolutionary plan B?"
There are many ideas floating around as to what 'Plan B' entails. Employee timesheeting, movement monitoring, home inventory, access control and more all become relatively easy with the installation of companion sensors, and NFC would make it easy for your smartphone to double as your home, car, office key and e-health identifier.
"I think NFC will be the next 'check-in' for location based services where discounts and e-vouchers could be transferred, and then read and honoured by stores," says another developer.
Still another sees NFC as a way of enabling Android devices to be used to casually interface with network equipment simply by bringing them into the proximity of the devices – a sort of Bluetooth connection, but without the pairing.
There's still no guaranteed indication as to whether Apple will add NFC to the iPhone 5, which would certainly push Android handset makers to hurry up and match them.
These sorts of delays may leave NFC in a bit of a limbo state for now – but as Android's capabilities are met by a preponderance of sensor-equipped devices, developers will be able to build applications that interact with users in more ways than ever before.
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A web site that allows self-employed specialists to bid for projects – Freelancer.com – has been mining its data to gauge the 
Tony is based in Surrey and is a veteran comms journalist. Tony also writes on the UK market. 
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