BiscottiGelato

Problem with Android... for someone that just want to whip out a phone and just use it. It's inferior to iPhone. Most people just use their phone. Need to look nice and work nice out of the box. Those stock Samsung Android stock interface icons are some of the most passionless icons ever. Just turning on your phone makes you not wanna bother learning it. They need to poach some Apple UI guys and need to do it fast.

I am tech savvy, but I just don't have time for this crap. Most my co-workers are 6 fig+ technical people. Semi-con design/dev, etc. Geeky as hell. All use iPhone. No one even blink an eye to Android. Nobody have time to play with custom ROM and such. Out of the box, iPhone looks good, uniform UI with strict functional and stylistic standard for every App before it's allowed to be released. No headache, all works.

What most people use is stock form, + at max an App or 2. Not a lot of people have all day to fiddle with the OS all day. Just find out what I want, give me as close as you can of what I want, with 0 overhead on my part. Just friggin work and work well! I don't have time to tweak it. It's just that simple.


Apple have developed this reputation where things just work, so just buy it and start doing things with it, as opposed to buy it and do things to get it working. Android will first need to develop in this mainstream direction, and then it needs to gain such a reputation... Then it will be able to take the mainstream business. Until then, it will be a slow battle...

BiscottiGelato

The look and feel of Android (Samsung mainly, being the closest rival) out of the box is still inferior to iPhone. I was playing with a bunch (S2, a HTC one, and some Motorola thing) yesterday. HTC's interface is better, but their phones aren't really any better than iPhone short the screen size. Samsung's phone trump iPhone in spec, but their UI is very very bad. This includes the Nexus Prime. The interface just doesn't look 'personable', feels cold and feels not refined.

I am sure with enough custom stuff you can get Samsung tech + an interface as easy to use as HTC/iOS. And get all the icons/look and feel up to par. Samsung should have that right out of the box if they want to target mainstream audience (where the money is). Google might want to just clamp down on the look and feel across the board, and a more tightly controlled channel for Google blessed Apps on it's App store. In fact I think Google's online tool's interfaces are pretty user friendly. But once Android gets in the hand of Samsung and the like, it became cold with high perceived learning curves...

And the analogy of a stock race car vs a modded car is a very good one. Only that stock fast cars are generally priced out of the general public. Where-as an overpriced phone is still affordable by majority of the middle class. And if it's a matter of convenience vs slight additional cost, it's been proven that time and time again that people will pay for convenience if the value is there and they can afford it,