[OrangeGuutan]

"Seeing the writing on the wall..."

Really? Is this what it has come to? I bought an iPhone 3G on day one, used it until the Nexus One came out, and have recently gone back to iOS and bought an iPhone 4.

Why? Because in my opinion, the quality of the apps I use on a daily basis are simply superior on iOS as compared to Android, whether the iPhone has 1% or 99% of the smartphone market. I'll repeat that again: the quality of the iPhone and iOS4 remains the same regardless of its market share!

I love Android's openness, and I even use Google Voice as my sole telephone number (yes, even with my iPhone 4). Wasn't enough; couldn't take the glitchiness, even in Android 2.2, and other annoying features of Android.

Because I know someone will yell "provide examples," here are some superior iOS apps that have no rival on Android: Reeder for iPhone (NewsRob is okay...), Twitter (Twitter for Android is okay...), Instapaper, Simplenote (there are glitchy apps that use the Simplenote API on Android), Dropbox (can't save for local access on Android), Pastebot, Calcbot, Convertbot (all are great examples of apps that are possible on Android, but have no where near the attention to detail), BeejiveIM, Calendar (yes I know Android has a calendar app, but it's weak), Mail (for all non-Gmail accounts, Android sucks, and for Gmail accounts, I find iOS4 to be equal to Android's stock Gmail app), etc. Oh, and I forgot to include all of the games that Android lacks, but I don't really play games so I didn't miss them with my Nexus One.

Point is, not everything is zero-sum; I can enjoy my iPhone regardless of how small or large its market share is! Can't we all just get along?

[ergo98]

"Really? Is this what it has come to? I bought an iPhone 3G on day one, used it until the Nexus One came out, and have recently gone back to iOS and bought an iPhone 4."

I think you are misreading what the "writing on the wall" is. It is not the end of the iPhone. Instead it is "the smartphone world will remain multi-polar, and the iPhone's domination is not a predetermined conclusion". Pundits like Gruber developed a cocky swagger of being on the "right", winning team, on some sort of morally justified religious campaign.

"Because I know someone will yell "provide examples," here are some superior iOS apps that have no rival on Android"

I would not at all debate that the overall app ecosystem on the iPhone is superior to Android, largely owing to its early lead, yet the gap is rapidly narrowing. Very rapidly.

However, to your specific examples, Dropzone of course allows local saving (just to prove I'm not insane, I just did it). The official twitter client is now considered the premiere version (it was developed by Google). RealCalc is a close-to-perfect calculator and conversion application (does it have a spinner? No. Do I want that in a calc/conv app? Of course not). Mail in Android 2.2 is superb, and the GMail client is unrivaled. There are hundreds of note taking apps, most of them excellent. Personally I think the Android calendaring app is excellent.

I think your examples are very weak, and most smell of being a pre-2.2 analysis. Where you are absolutely and overwhelmingly right is games, where iOS has a massive lead, owing to the wide disparity in hardware capabilities of Android devices, and many devs targeting the lowest common denominator.

[OrangeGuutan]

"I think you are misreading what the "writing on the wall" is..."

iOS is still the winning team at the moment, not Android, in terms of total devices out in the wild and more importantly to developers, app sales. I wonder how much more money the App Store has made since, say, January 1st, 2010 than the Android Marketplace...

"I would not at all debate that the overall app ecosystem on the iPhone is superior to Android, largely owing to its early lead, yet the gap is rapidly narrowing. Very rapidly."

Is it? The gap in total number of apps might be narrowing, but I don't see the quality gap getting any closer.

As to "Dropzone" (I assume you mean Dropbox?) allowing local saving, yes, it does. But it saves the files to the SD card, and opening the same file in Dropbox isn't any faster than downloading it for the first time. On the iPhone, after the initial download, the file opens noticeably faster.

You can call the Android Twitter client whatever you'd like, but the UI is not (in my opinion) nearly on the same level as Twitter or Twitterrific or numerous other iOS twitter apps, and scrolling is still janky as ever (much like scrolling in the rest of Android).

RealCalc is fine, and spinner or not is a personal preference. But show me an app for Android that has the kind of attention to detail as described here: http://tapbots.com/blog/design/designing-convertbot

Mail in Android 2.2 is not superb, and not as responsive as Mail for iOS. Plus, the UI for Mail in Android makes my eyes burn. Gmail for Android is wonderful, but I find Mail for iOS just as good for use with Gmail.

Yes, there are hundreds of note taking apps for Android, but most are ugly and don't sync. Plus I'm not a big fan of the apps that do sync (AK Notepad and 3Banana), as I don't like the style of note taking encouraged by snaptic.com.

The calendar app for Android is alright, but it misses the little things. In Calendar for iOS, when I move to say February 2011 and go to create a new event, it intelligently knows that the date of the new event is likely in February 2011. Try this in Android's calendar app...

2.2 is nice, but it's very telling that most people immediately go and download LauncherPro to replace the jerky scrolling found in the default launcher. And 2.2 still doesn't reach the level of responsiveness found in iOS4 while using the iPhone 4. And yes, games on Android are pathetic, nothing more to say on that front. It may sound like I hate Android, but I actually think it's pretty decent. I did enjoy my time with the Nexus One. But it reminds me heavily of the differences between Windows and OS X; Windows is functional but not enjoyable, OS X is both.

[ergo98]

>2.2 is nice, but it's very telling that most people immediately go and download LauncherPro

Most is quite an exaggeration.

>But it reminds me heavily of the differences between Windows and OS X; Windows is functional but not enjoyable, OS X is both.

Windows 7 is thoroughly enjoyable. I'm hardly a Microsoft booster.

It's interesting that several of the apps you mentioned, highlighting the strength of the iOS platform, to me demonstrate the weakness of it: They're chrome and gloss and not much more. If I want a conversion app, the last thing I want is a giant graphical wheel, but that seems to be the way many iOS, and OSX for that matter, apps go: Take some trivial, trivial task and provide a minimal solution, but coating it with just enough chrome that people will call it "polish", while they hoard the spit-and-rub apps that they'll never actually use.

I pray that that sort of interface hubris never migrates to Android, and if it leaves some people complaining about the lack of supposed polish, so be it.