“With the Japanese cell phone market way more fractured than ours, I can only hope that the continued success of the iPhone in the country and experience that Japanese companies garner from the platform will mean that all territories can soon approach development on an even playing field.”
I’m going to blast through several subject here so… This is a quote I took from an article written at GamePro.com titled “The differences between Japanese and Western iPhone development” It talks about the cross of how Japanese development teams and Western publishers are taking place because of the ‘even playing field’ opportunities provided by the western markets via iPhone.
As technologically advanced Japan is over the western commercial markets; the article/quote shows that the actual product potential is heavily limited because of the fractures created by uneven forward momentum of the overall hardware and software development. I’m not saying that we are completely opposite in the western markets and here. And honestly the only major attraction existing here that has an even playing field for the foreign market mobile developers is still and only the iPhone.
Android is the closest thing that comes near to iOS, (with Windows Phone 7 showing great potential). But currently Android’s insolvency to effectively challenge iPhone remains, due to the lack of proper hardware support. Because certain version of Android’s OS gets stuck on phones with no possible solutions for further updates. This fragmentation is created cause there are too many variations of the hardware systems carrying Android OS, and though they may have the same OS design in core, not all phones can specifically handle future OS version and updates which then support the new Apps that are built around them. So certain phones can only handle certain version of the OS, and they fall behind because the hardware’s inability to support the further updated/developed OS’s. (Phones get stuck on the certain OS versions due to the lack of proper or hardware specification requirements to progress, where iPhones is one system, one design and powerful enough to keep with certain long-term updates, giving the consumer time to adapt to newer platforms). Effect… Androids claim to having over 100,000 Apps is not the full picture that they are painting. Because 30% of their Apps may only support version 1.0, another 30% can only support version 1.6 and so forth, and with new hardware’s coming out faster than the contract expiring things can get sour.
Many would blame Apple’s dominance in the market on their ownerships of patents that limit hardware and software developers from doing things right in one big shot. And that truth is that the competing companies really have no choice but to do what they do; so every-time they find loophole or a different way of doing the same thing without causing the billion dollar lawsuit, they apply to the new hardware and dump it on the market.
So who can blame them; coming under the wrath of iPhone’s success majority of these cell-phone manufacturing companies were forced to scramble in-order save their market capital values and moreover sustain some forms of their falling market shares. And to add more, all major wireless mobile carriers services almost completely opted out on contracts categorically to not purchase anymore phone systems other than smart-phone devices. Because there is simply way more money to be made on these system.
So in all cases is seems that there is no option but to wait and see when the competing companies will balance out their problems, by slowly evolving their products into more narrower lines and more unified operating hardware platforms. As they say sometimes, less is more!
Why are there so many versions of Android?
Well the iPhone’s patent bag is something that’s not so easy to get around. And if and when they do it’s usually it’s one company at a time, with one phone at a time. So these include both hardware and software advancements through sometimes finding loopholes or just a different way of doing the same thing without causing a billion dollar lawsuit. In additions there carrier specific demands. HTC, Motorola and Samsung will all find a different ways of doing things it but they wont share with each other… etc. etc. Where Apple is totally the opposite on where it has an amazing leverage over their service provider partners to do things more their way, and they also have a safe unified form of operations and developments. But again I believe that over time the competing companies will catch up. Especially now the game will get more interesting as Windows Phone 7 in the bigger mix. Plus there are so many developers support the other platform because of easier development restrictions and etc.
InvestingAmateur
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