| Android gets raked over the coals for years for bad customer experience. Google attempts to reign in fragmentation and divergent and inconsistent UI experience, and move more of firmware to Play store so it can issue security updates to customers without carriers and OEMs blocking. Google raked over the coals for anti-competition. Meanwhile, Apple ships iTunes and App Store, which can only be used with their own cloud stores. They ship iMessage which only works with their Cloud. Apple Maps. A fitness app. A wallet. A payment system. etc All in a proprietary, single vendor system, closed source. If every Android phone's out of box experience was a random collection of OEM apps that had no common standard, the consumer experience would be terrible. Switch from a Samsung to an LG device and you might be hit by the fact that the device has none of the apps you were using on your previous phone, you have to delete all of the current apps, and reinstall all of your previous ones, enter all the settings again, all of the login credentials, etc. The switching cost would be huge and it would cause OEM lock in. The setup process is a factor in consumer choice. If you are faced with an onerous gauntlet of selection dialogs for 10+ apps when you start (it's not just app store, browser, maps, but email, music, video, camera, photos, etc), consumers are going to be very annoyed. I don't want to spend 30 minutes to an hour unboxing my phone and "installing", that's what used to happen on PCs. And what happens when things go wrong. If the user installs a third party app store, and gets malware, do you think they're going to be blamed, or Google's Android brand will be blamed? Most consumers aren't aware enough to narrow down who to blame. So in the end, you'd be asking Google to assume all the brand risk, all of the complaints over fragmentation and failure to patch older phones, and making consumer experience worse. Apple has none of these problems. Say what you will about their locked down platform, the one thing you don't have to worry about is inconsistent getting starting experience or malware from the App Store. The 'choice' being presented here is the kind of choice hackers and engineers love, but it's not the kind of choice one's parents and relatives may love. It's just hobbling attempts to improve the Android experience. |
