Honeycomb and Gingerbread are not the names given to cakes but the nicknames of the various versions of Android, Google’s operating system. In 3 years of existence, Google has become serious competition for Apple. With 100 million smartphones and tablets running Android and billions of app downloads in the Android Market, Google has partnered with big mobile phone companies (HTC, Samsung, Motorola, etc) and created an unregulated environment for open-source developers to upload apps – as opposed to the strict regulations imposed by Apple.
Google’s ambition is to make Android the centre of its users’ lives by handing them an über-efficient remote control: all appliances in your house should communicate wirelessly to each other, phones will soon turn into credit cards and travel passes.
Android’s strengths and weaknesses
A major strength of living in the Google bubble is the capacity of tying in all their cloud-based apps through your Google account (Gmail, Google Calendar, etc). Everything is immediately available on your device.
Android is also famous for being easy for developers to create and upload apps. While the Apple iOS would make them jump through the roof when looking at the complexity of the required programming language, Android makes the Android SDK (Software Development Kit) available to anyone for free and creating apps is achievable within a few hours.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of Android!
Pros
- You can control the look and feel of your screen: you can change pretty much every designed item in your phone: keyboard, icons, etc. Apple kindly allows you to change… the wallpaper.
- You can control your operating system, remove your manufacturer’s software or install Linux on some mobile phones for instance.
- With App Inventor you can create apps with no programming skills.
- Android can work on a large variety of hardware and screen sizes. It’s very flexible software.
Cons
- Three versions of Android are on the market; this creates some compatibility issues with apps not running so well on some versions. The next release called Ice Cream Sandwich will address this issue.
- It’s great that everyone can create apps but it can also bring dubious quality apps to phones and sifting through them can be a frustrating exercise.
- Android’s open-source nature exposes it to bigger threats since you might be at risk of downloading viruses on your phone. Get good anti-virus software!
What next?
The Android team is working on a few novelties. Coming soon, the 4.0 version of Android, named Ice Cream Sandwich, will improve the compatibility between phones and tablets making the experience of viewing apps similar on both devices.
Android@Home is the next big project. Imagine being able to turn on and off lights, pre-heat your oven before getting home, control the room temperature, switch off your TV and close your front door locks… only using your mobile phone. It is Android’s ambition to integrate many aspects of your home tasks to apps. And considering the Google culture this should be accessible to everyone on Android cheaply and very soon.
