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Opinon: Andy Rubin’s tweet to Steve Jobs

Take this tweet by Google’s own Andy Rubin in response to Steve Jobs’ recent comments on the ‘open’ vs. ‘closed’ debate surrounding Android and iOS.

If you understand what the tweet means, you’re in a privileged minority of tech-savvy users of open source software repositories, and can recognise its contents as a set of simple commands to download and build your very own copy of the Android OS.

For the rest of us mere mortals, Andy Ruben’s response does little but highlight Google’s entire attitude towards their approach to the smartphone: a complete disregard for the average end-user’s understanding (or lack thereof) of the underlying technology of what should be a ‘pick up and use’ device.

Google’s approach to the smartphone is the same tech-focused approach that Linux brings to the PC, and we all know where that leads: great flexibility for geeks and hackers, and total, utter bafflement for everyone else.

Sure, there are advantages to an open platform, even by Google’s definition of the term. But leaving a smartphone platform ‘open’ with the implication that manufacturers will do the right thing when it comes to deploying it is disingenuous if not outright naive: when it comes to deploying a ‘differentiated’ smartphone platform, manufacturers and carriers have a strong track record of prioritizing their latest marketing project over the final user experience, resulting in the kludgy, bloatware-infested ‘custom’ Android deployments we see today. The end result? Platform fragmentation and user confusion. 

Apple, for all its shortcomings, does a lot of things right when it comes to the average smartphone user: iOS provides a safe haven of basic usability and consistency, while letting developers go more or less wild (yes, within limits) with more customized and varied types of functional user experiences.

Want to use your iPhone as a stethoscope? There’s an app for that. Use the phone’s sensors to see how many G-forces your car can pull? There’s an app for that too. But underneath it all there’s a well thought-out, consistent user experience for those simpler tasks you bought your iPhone or iPod for. 

Call me lazy, but I’ll put my money on closed and predictable over open and broken any day of the week. Technology should make life easier, not more complicated. In the end, it will be much easier for Apple to lift some developer restrictions (if the market calls for it) than for Google to bring consistency to their increasingly fragmented platform.

[Originally posted as a comment to this article]