Ask HN: Has iOS irrevocably fallen behind?

As a developer I think you're obsessed with features. Whereas users don't necessarily want those features. Apple's bet is that users will reject the platform with more features in favor of the platform that works better.<p>Let's take your examples. When most people search their phone they're looking for information in either mail, contacts, or SMS messages. They don't want the data from the other hundred programs on their phone cluttering up the important results from those areas. So in this case Apple's stance is actually an advantage for the users.<p>On the cloud to device API it is nice but it's not like you can't accomplish the same goal simply by polling. So while this is an area where android is superior I don't think it's a feature that makes that much of a difference.<p>All that said the greatest argument against android winning because of features is the fact that they've always had more features than iOS. I mean if multitasking wasn't a big enough feature to woo users to android than I don't think something like cloud to device messaging is going to do it.

I'll say it again. Apple iOS and the platform is at least 5 years ahead of all competitors.<p>Keep this in mind, noone has an answer for the iPod Touch or the iPad yet. The iPod Touch outsells the PSP and nearly the DS in devices and in terms of content sales via iTunes (games and entertainment, none come close).<p>The iPad is another gaming console in a way and a pretty cheap laptop replacement. Not to mention the book market.<p>The iPad and iPod Touch make up over 65%+ devices sold by Apple and brings the total iOS devices to over 100 million.<p>Other companies keep thinking this is a Phone only market. When in fact the iPhone is only about 35-40% of Apple's devices that use the iOS and the iTunes/Appstore platform.<p>Where is the response to that? How many years will it take others to understand this. Apple is owning the mobile and handheld market and is making a ploy for all entertainment devices not just phones. Apple has to love that the competition looks past 65%+ of their market every new device.<p>The iPod Touch and iPad are the equivalent of Apple II's in schools and candy cigarettes when it comes time for kids to grow up and buy a phone. All their apps and games will be there waiting for them when they get one. This market is about so much more than phones...

I'm not particularly an Apple fan boy, but I do admire their design decisions. Apple has an _uncanny_ ability to take a block of marble (a set of features for a phone) and grind away at it until what's left is a minimally complete set of features that are (in general) perfect.<p>I was definitely the first to gripe and complain when the iPhone didn't have cut and paste, but I'll also be the first to admit that they _did_ get it right when they finally released it.<p>I was also one of the many loud voices complaining that I couldn't run backgrounded apps, but when you look at the HTC phones coming out right now running Android and full backgrounding, and you hear the stories of how the battery runs out by the early afternoon, you start to realize that, it is true, "it is easy to add &#60;feature x&#62;, but it is hard to get it right" (or whatever it was that jobs said in his announcements)<p>I'm not saying that the features in Android aren't impressive, they very well may be, but Apple's design decisions don't just go after "impressive", they try to go after "perfect", and sometimes getting features perfect means cutting them until you're ready<p>Your entire post is targetted as "features that developers want" and you're right, you need a healthy ecosystem of developers, and Google is certainly building one. However, you also need a healthy ecosystem of consumers who love the product, and at the end of the day, I really think most developers will go to the platform where they can reach the widest audience. Apple cares about their consumers first, and their developers second (and sometimes it feels like second last), but it seems to work for them...<p>edit: of course, sometimes apple's PR doesn't respond to consumers as best as it could (i.e. the "you're holding it wrong"), but I'm trying to focus on design/product decisions

Go tell your mom about the new features that Froyo has. Watch her eyes glaze over as you talk about "cloud-to-phone messaging APIs" and "APIs to make app data searchable".<p>Now show her the iphone 4 retina display.

As an unabashed Apple hater who thinks the company is little more than hype and marketing, I have to say strongly NO, iOS has not fallen behind the other OSs.<p>You point to Android specifically, but I don't think anything you've mentioned is a selling point on the device/os specifically.<p>is 'cloud-to-phone messaging api' really something that a customer is going to be looking at when comparing devices? And if so, is it actually a feature that can't be replicated in any OS quite simply?<p>I think the market share challenges in the mobile space are less about OS feature capabilities like you describe than the more basic requirements like battery life, screen quality, design and brand perception.<p>Using your cloud-to-phone example again, is this really that much different from app notifications in iPhone (I'm pretty sure that is in the api). You say it's the features that developers want, but developers need to focus on the needs of consumers, rather than just what's the geekiest thing I can build.<p>If Apple is falling behind anywhere, I suspect it is in the UI design, which I don't find particularly compelling. It does a decent job of getting out of the way, and it is nicer than blackberry, but it very quickly seemed to have gone from cutting edge to ho-hum. I don't look at an iphone and think that it is beautiful and easy to use. The home screen with all the buttons and no way of organizing them seems clutter, and the grid is bland without any character.

1. That I/O keynote was something else in terms of mindshare. Before, Android was an ugly also-ran where devs were making a tenth of the income they made on iOS. After, Android was still ugly and making a tenth of the income for devs, but was transformed into an inevitable iPhone-killer. The facts were the same. If you bash Apple for hype, take Vic with a pinch of salt.<p>2. iOS 4 is packed with features for devs. Some of the new APIs and block-based animations have taken hundreds of lines of code out of my apps. Doing common tasks like throwing a new view on the screen are massively simpler compared to doing the same on Android.<p>3. Feature comparisons impressed IT managers in 1989 as they sat choosing between Word and WordPerfect from a list in Byte. Users don't care; they want things that work. They didn't care that the iPod didn't have wireless or as much space as a Nomad, and they still don't.<p>4. Seriously, features don't factor into it. For 8 years companies were trying to best the iPod by ladling in features, and each time the market told them to go zune eggs.<p>5. The phone companies are absolutely destroying Android. They're still launching devices with hacked-up versions of 1.6, with no promise of when Froyo will ever make it on there -- that is if the carriers decide to allow it. Imagine if Microsoft had been launching XP but Dell decided it would keep on shipping Win 98, and AOL wouldn't let users even upgrade to Win 2000. Ludicrous.

Don't use words like "irrevocably". They kind of tag your post as FUD. (Along as statements like "being a long time Apple loyalist... it saddens me...".) And, why do you really think something like this should be irrevocably? How can it be?<p>Then, when I read the title, I just thought 'wtf'? Behind? So I read your post because I was curious about what you mean. Again, I even more wonder what you mean by irrevocably. And how those few missing APIs should be the reason that iOS is behind Android.

&#62; <i>When I see features like Android's cloud-to-phone messaging APIs, I long for them to be in iOS. But then iOS 4 has nothing of this sort.</i><p>Isn’t that exactly what push notifications are? Apps like Notifo, and Boxcar for that matter, allow you to implement push notifications for anything (c.f. Github integration) without even a dedicated iPhone app.<p>&#62; <i>users don't care about [fragmentation].</i><p>While Joe Consumer may not grok fragmentation, it definitely impacts his experience. E.g. the official Twitter app not being available on Droid or the Incredible, last I heard.<p>I don’t see Apple as missing the boat so much as taking their time to do things right. Just like copy-paste and multitasking. Patience for the polish, or yeah, go to Android.<p>To answer your question, iPhone will, yes, always lack features Android has, for the foreseeable future, but the experience is smoother and more consistent. Strictly in this sense, it it Android that will never catch up.<p>(This is pretty much what Gruber has been saying: <a href="http://www.macworld.com/article/151235/2010/05/apple_rolls.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.macworld.com/article/151235/2010/05/apple_rolls.h...</a>)

&#62; After watching the complete Google I/O keynote and WWDC '10 keynote<p>I was at WWDC. There are a lot of things I saw there that I'm not supposed to talk about. Suffice it to say that the cool stuff was NOT in the keynote.<p>I came out of WWDC thinking that Google may very well never catch up. They don't seem to care about Android like Apple cares about the iPhone. Apple cares enough about the iPhone to learn how to do cloud services (see Push) and advertising (see iAd) better than Google, things that Apple has no experience doing well. But Google doesn't care about Android enough to invest into build quality or UI, things that Apple does well.

You don't know what Apple is working on. Nor do you know if any of those Android features will work properly or will be "all that." This is just the typical hopscotching that happens all the time in the industry. In a few months, you might be doing a post about webOS vs Android vs iOS. Buy something and just enjoy it.

As much as I dislike Apple as a company and love the idea of the Android, I think Apple has totally nailed the concept of the handheld as a sweet and sexy little unit that the average person can take great pleasure in using. It's got very little to do with "features" and everything to do with the experience. So yeah, Android might have features that make the average geek go weak at the knees but Google, at least so far, hasn't shown the ability to get past the engineering and into the joy of the interface. I'm hoping that Gingerbread will get there, but it takes a supreme focus to do good UI. Apple's got it, Google needs to get it.

I do not think that iOS' weakness versus Android would be based on its quality But on reach. The iPhone is on a single form of Phone while Android is available on various forms of phones.<p>Android will be to Phones what Windows is to PCs (personal computers).<p>Its added advantage is Google is more open than Microsoft will ever be.<p>One more thing, Android competes favorable with iOS. Much better that Windows does with OSX

Are you joking? The iPhone has been behind on "features" since before the G1 even came out.<p>Let's roll back the clock, shall we? When the first iPhone came out, the OS didn't have support for copy/paste, or MMS, or video recording, or any way to install third-party applications, or a whole ton of Bluetooth devices, or a dozen other random things that everybody claimed were totally necessary.<p>It is absolutely not the case that iOS had a huge head start and Android has just now caught up (from a feature perspective). Android has been banging the "We have more features!" drum since before the G1 even launched. But here's the thing: even with all those awesome features, the Android software is still nowhere near as well-designed as iOS or the apps that ship with it.

It doesn't matter - iOS and Android both have features that will require at least 5 years for the mass of consumers to catch onto. Most people still want to make calls, check their email, surf the web and play a game on their phone.<p>So, as long as phones can do that, anything extra is developer wankery.

<i>If Apple falls behind on features that developers want, the App Store numbers they like to tout to loudly will stop growing so rapidly.</i><p>Highly unlikely; unless they lose their consumer market too.<p>Because, at the end of the day, developers will jump through a few hoops (and rightfully gripe) to sell to the biggest user base.

I'm moving from native iPhone to web apps for mobile. The tools will catch up to flash rapidly. The browsers will kick themselves into line, so its viable to have one code base. But most of all... Javascript is just less verbose than Objective-C, and you go straight to market, bypassing appstore/signing madness.<p>I don't think its iOS4 specific, once you have geo-location + offline + appdata + GPU graphics you've got the killer features you need, so why go native?<p>WebGL will happen, theyll have to support it &#38; its easy to do so. Now I guess you might want to do AI in-game as the device gets more powerful, and write effects shaders for rich games.. But a lot of that can be deferred to server-side, so I think even for 3D games it will soon make more sense to go web app.<p>What apple have is slickness and consistency... but I think the slickness of web on Android will approach that asymptotically. The web dev platform is more scaleable, less pain, and wont go away.<p>What is missing is a good appstore + billing system for web apps [and google will probably be there in a year]. I think it needs to support a SaaS model where I rent a group of apps at a discount on a yearly basis. That way you have people invest more effort over time, innovate, and reach beyond the iFart apps.

There's good arguments to be made both ways but you're doing a lot of speculation/editorializing about the future instead of addressing more specific examples of how you think iOS is falling behind in a more concrete way. I don't think that's a good approach to get substantive opinions. Besides this cloud-to-device feature, which sounds a lot like Apple's Push notifications to me, can you cite a few more examples? You mention Gingerbread is going to address fragmentation but Google has stated &#60;2.2 will remain in use for lower end/legacy devices. How does that solve fragmentation anytime soon? If Gingerbread is coming out in October there is a pretty good chance 50% (at least) of Android devices won't even have 2.2 by then.

"To be honest, as a user, iOS 4 adds nothing that truly stands out as "THIS is why I must have the iPhone" except for Facetime and the Retina Display."<p>I am confused. You started your post as a developer and end being an user.<p>There are some big things in iOS4. Multitasking (done properly), iAds, Game Center and 1500 New APIs and tonnes of improvements that apple has put in after taking experiences of millions apps created by thousands of developers. And That's HUGE.

I think the important thing is that Apple doesn't include features for the purpose of having them. It's frivolous to have a feature that doesn't work properly or can't effectively be leveraged by developers. Apple patiently fleshes out everything before it's publicly released. So while Android's OS might technically be more advanced than iOS, in practicality and implementation iOS is the best mobile platform. For example, look at the front facing camera. iPhone 4 wasn't the first to have a front facing camera, but it was the first to have one that simply works — and that's what consumers want.<p>So, to answer your question, no: iOS hasn't irrevocably fallen behind. Has it fallen behind, technically? Yeah, probably. Irrevocably so? No.

Nothing is irrevocable. This reminds me of the people telling "AMD/Intel/nVidia is doomed" when competitor happens to release a bit better product. AMD did manage to get a profitable quarter after being unprofitable for many many years.

Apple does better frontend. Google does better backend. It will be interesting to see which makes the difference. The transparent, sync-free integration with Google services is the main reason I prefer my Android phone but if Apple steps it up with Mobile Me and bundles it with the phone they might be able to catch up.<p>My hunch is that Google will have an easier time staying close enough on the UI front than Apple will catching up on services but we'll see. Lawsuits might make the difference.

Probably, but also BaseCamp has fallen incredibly behind MS Project in terms of features. Apple doesn't compete on features they compete on profit margin. When Google has something that will convince people to stop paying Apple's margins then I'd start worrying about iPhone's viability as a platform.<p>If you want to develop on a platform where people are willing to pay premium prices for premium products then you have nothing to worry about with Froyo.

Us nerds care about obscure nifty features, but 99% of people don't.<p>In fact, I think in some ways iOS 4 is a step backwards, in that it adds half baked "features" like folders and the multitasking UI (my gripe is with the UI only). They aren't nearly as well thought out as the rest of the OS.<p>Android does have some well implemented features which I like though, specifically Facebook integration with the address book, etc.

So I am wondering why you would particularly care, unless you are just an observer.<p>If you are a developer, you want to ask 1) is it programmable 2) is there a market for something that I create.<p>It seems that the answer is yes for both of these.<p>Bullet points are for bystanders.

I just wish Apple would fix this: <a href="http://jnjnjn.com/161/ipad-volume-indicator/" rel="nofollow">http://jnjnjn.com/161/ipad-volume-indicator/</a>

"Perfection is achieved by nothing else to remove, not adding more."

When did Froyo become available?

yes

Apple already won consumer mobile market, while Google with its Android will dominate emerging so-called enterprise one.<p>If you want to write some module or extention for your corporate system for mobile devices - Android is the obvious choice.<p>The history repeats itself, Google will be to Apple what Redhat was to Sun, Data General, SCO, and other now dead UNIX vendors. It just a matter of a time.

The store is a selling point for users. That's the one unique thing that's not going to be written off by people (like design). It can change, Google might start getting decent quality apps. But so long as the users are there, and developers can make money, I see no reason for either the user or the developer to leave.<p>Yes, there is intense competition now and each player has to keep up with its OS features. We'll see who can keep their OS up to date with features that are important enough.