An Android User’s Take on Yesterday’s iPhone News

Interesting piece from Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch:

I don’t mean to say I found the iPhone 4 to be disappointing — it will be incredibly successful, and many of my friends are champing at the bit to get one. But I expected to walk out of San Francisco’s Moscone Center yesterday longing for the next iPhone despite my current allegiance to Android. That didn’t happen.

One thing that I’ve been thinking about today is that yesterday’s announcements really showed how different Apple’s priorities are from Google’s. What Apple has focused on is making the iPhone feel and look better. It’s about how it feels in your hand, about how amazing the new Retina Display looks. It’s about even better battery life.

People who prefer Android over the iPhone value different things. I’ll bet Android users were more likely to expect that Apple would announce a new UI for notifications, for example. I think Apple probably will create a richer UI for notifications in iOS at some point — but their immediate priorities lie elsewhere.

Put another way, I think there are Android users like Kincaid who hoped to see Apple play catch-up to Android in certain areas, but I don’t think Apple sees any areas where they need to make iOS more Android-like at all.

★ Tuesday, 8 June 2010