Android’s day-one advantages: how many are left?

When I chose my first Android device over an iPhone in 2009, each plat­form had exact­ly one device avail­able and the deci­sion of which plat­form was for me was clear.

Even back then, to those who had been pay­ing atten­tion to the smart­phone world, the iPhone arrived as some­thing that was­n’t quite a smart­phone. It had an advanced web brows­er and slick Google Maps app that were both bet­ter than any­thing else avail­able, but lacked a lot of fea­tures that exist­ed in pre­vi­ous smart­phones — the biggest omis­sion being third-party app devel­op­ment. But the world very quick­ly for­got how anti-app Steve Jobs’ Apple was at launch, and how the ‘no, you can’t devel­op for iPhone’ atti­tude led to web app mon­strosi­ties skinned with brushed met­al and pin­stripes, which peo­ple quick­ly cooked up to look “iPhone native” in the ear­ly days.

Of course, the ear­ly days did­n’t last long. An SDK and the App Store showed up a year lat­er, but for a long time iPhone remained on my “still would­n’t even con­sid­er” list because it was still miss­ing things I con­sid­ered basic func­tion­al­i­ty, things that Android got right, right from the start.

But it’s not 2009 any­more! So where are we now? Let’s take a look back and see how many of these Android advan­tages are still applic­a­ble today, 12 years later.

    • Devices avail­able from mul­ti­ple manufacturers
    • Outside-of-app-store apps avail­able (not a walled-garden)
    • Almost entire­ly open-source OS
    • Third-party devel­op­ment possible
    • Mul­ti­task­ing
    • Cus­tom input methods/software keyboards
    • Selec­tion of devices with hard­ware keyboards
    • Cut and paste
    • Exten­si­ble, sys­temwide ‘share’ functionality
    • Not AT&T‑exclusive
    • SIM-unlocking actu­al­ly allowed
    • No desk­top client need­ed for setup
    • Filesys­tem
    • Casu­al­ly swap­pable battery

Things aren’t look­ing good! Apple (and Google them­selves!) has chipped away at Android advan­tages over the years, though the two that remain on my list remain huge.

But I some­times gaze jeal­ous­ly at the iOS world and its devices with com­pe­tent sup­port and five years of updates and won­der if the prin­ci­ples that led me to choose Android are still worth anything.

On wishing for boredom

This is not a post about Steve Jobs. I read enough of them in the days and weeks after his death. I read in these a lot of what I already knew and learned some new stuff for sure, but one Steve quote stood out to me in Wired’s obit­u­ary:

I’m a big believ­er in bore­dom,” he told me. Bore­dom allows one to indulge in curios­i­ty, he explained, and “out of curios­i­ty comes everything.”

I’m not sure if I’d head this quote from him before, but it put into words some­thing that has been trou­bling me for some time: I haven’t been bored in years.

The first time I noticed this was in the mid-2000s, and  I only real­ized part of it, and I saw it through the lens of my Inter­net usage, par­tic­u­lar­ly RSS. Even today, as the cool kids have moved on to fol­low­ing Twit­ter feeds (real­ly, talk about a step back­wards) of web­sites and blogs they find inter­est­ing, I’m still a huge fan of the no-bullshit, user-in-control, decen­tral­ized pow­er of RSS.1

What occurred to me back then was that hav­ing posts pushed to me dai­ly gave me more read­ing mate­r­i­al than I need­ed. And since I could nev­er get all the way through the unread glut of posts from blogs I’d sub­scribed to, my need to ever go for­ag­ing for inter­est­ing things to read basi­cal­ly dis­ap­peared. RSS gave me tons of serendip­i­ty (thank you, linkblogs!)… and at the same time, prac­ti­cal­ly none at all. I miss the old days — some would say the bad old days — when I’d get my online enter­tain­ment and ran­dom bits of enlight­en­ment by brows­ing aim­less­ly from link to link, being per­son­al­ly point­ed to inter­est­ing things by friends on AIM, fol­low­ing lat­est links post­ed to proto-blogs like Pix­el­sur­geon, and… I don’t know, how­ev­er else we found cool shit back then.

The sec­ond time I felt this effect of this was at some point over the last few years, but this time in a more gen­er­al sense. This time it was big­ger than RSS; this time it was about every­thing in my life.

I real­ized I have far too many options for enter­tain­ment. There are two rea­sons for this: mas­sive dig­i­tal stor­age devices and the fact that, being employed gives me an actu­al enter­tain­ment bud­get for pur­chas­ing paid media and fan­cy devices on which to expe­ri­ence it. Between a pile of unread books and bunch of e‑books; more unwatched movies, sea­sons of old TV shows and ani­me series than I can name; and games galore that I’ll nev­er fin­ish (thank you Nin­ten­do Wii and DS, Android phone and a still-kickin’ Atari 2600), I’m pret­ty much set for… for­ev­er.2 Even if I don’t seek out any­thing new, it’ll be years and years before I get through all of this. And it’s not like I can just ignore new releas­es and stuff I become aware of in the meantime!

I might be able to enjoy this world o’ plen­ty, if I could for­get about what life was like when I was grow­ing up, before we had the com­put­ing pow­er, stor­age and net­work capac­i­ty to expe­ri­ence all the dig­i­tal rich­es of more enter­tain­ment than we’ll ever need. I spent so much time being bored grow­ing up, aim­less­ly think­ing and day­dream­ing and such. This was before my first com­put­er; I had tons of books and had prob­a­bly read almost all of them, made good use of the pub­lic library, played with toys, action fig­ures and stuff a whole lot and still found time to be bored and day­dream because it seemed like I had run out of things to do.

If you live a sim­i­lar­ly full, media-rich and employed first-world life, and can still ever find your­self so lux­u­ri­ous­ly bored, how do you man­age? And can you teach me?


  1. Google Read­er, please don’t die.[]
  2. I did­n’t men­tion music here, because the way I con­sume music is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. I still clear­ly have more than I “need,” but I don’t feel the same sort of pres­sure to get through it all, thanks to shuf­fle mode.[]

Steve Jobs on unintended uses of tools

A choice quote from an all-around inter­est­ing interview:

The point is that tools are always going to be used for cer­tain things we don’t find per­son­al­ly pleas­ing. And it’s ulti­mate­ly the wis­dom of peo­ple, not the tools them­selves, that is going to deter­mine whether or not these things are used in pos­i­tive, pro­duc­tive ways.

–Steve Jobs, 1985

goatse mobile

I had a strange moment of serendip­i­ty ear­li­er this evening.

I was read­ing some RSS feeds and I saw there was a new post to the Flickr tag “first­goatse.” (If the term goatse is new to you, I’m not sure what to say except: don’t blame me when you look it up… now. The above link is safe to view, by the way.)

I felt like I had­n’t seen a ‘first­goatse’ in a while, so I checked it out. The pho­to itself was unre­mark­able, but I was view­ing it on my Nexus S phone and hap­pened to glance away from the screen, at the phone itself. Some­thing clicked in my head, and I thought of a way to breathe new life into the age-old pas­time of show­ing your friends dis­gust­ing images and cap­tur­ing their hor­ri­fied reac­tion for shar­ing on the Internet.

HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS WE ALL HAVE SMARTPHONES WITH FRONT-FACING CAMERAS!! (It must be the future!) These tiny pock­et devices are cor­nu­copias of giv­ing: lulz for us, lulz for the Inter­net, and hor­rif­ic, can-ever-forget mem­o­ries for our friends!

Basi­cal­ly, what the best app ever would do is dis­play a hor­rif­ic image of your choice… self-supplied of course, in case your poi­son is more tub­girl, or what­ev­er kids these days show oth­er kids these days. It would also cap­ture the reac­tion of the per­son hold­ing the phone via the front-facing cam­era, at the very moment of exposure.

A series of pho­tos lead­ing up to the moment would work nice­ly too. Heck, what about cap­tur­ing a video of the entire reac­tion? For all I know, kids these days are show­ing each oth­er the video equiv­a­lent of that guy bend­ing over and… ugh. For bonus points, it might even com­bine the orig­i­nal and reac­tion videos into one, side-by-side, not that any­one would want to ever view that.

I’m ready to believe that a mobile app like this already exists. It clear­ly, how­ev­er, can’t exist for iPhone, because Apple does­n’t allow that brand of awe­some, and I can’t be both­ered to check the Android Mar­ket (aside from, okay, my quick search for “goatse,” which turned up noth­ing), but this is clear­ly the kind of app that the wold today could use.

Well, there’s a Mac app, but who can fit that in their pocket?

Hey world — some­body make this!

Real artists ship”

I’m by no means an Apple fan, and don’t own any Apple prod­ucts (though I’ve always want­ed to play with a New­ton!), but to a geek, it’s pret­ty hard to ignore the effects that Apple has had on the world around us.

This prob­a­bly would­n’t make it to the aver­age list of Apple’s con­tri­bu­tions, but my per­son­al favorite is a Steve Jobs saying:

Real artists ship.”

I take this to mean that you can keep pol­ish­ing the prod­uct until it’s per­fect, but it does­n’t mat­ter how great it is unless it makes it out the door while it’s still rel­e­vant. (No, it did­n’t take a lot of read­ing deeply into the phrase for me to come up with that, Mr. Hypo­thet­i­cal Snarky Com­menter. An alter­nate mean­ing could be an expla­na­tion for push­ing a prod­uct out the door when it con­tains bugs that may give oth­ers pause.)

I some­times find myself spend­ing more time than I should on some­thing, in pur­suit of get­ting it unim­peach­ably per­fect. It’s a flaw of mine. I need to do some­thing about that, but I’m not sure what… and giv­ing up on qual­i­ty isn’t an option. Con­sid­er this bug #1 in my pub­lic bug track­er, pow­ered by WordPress. ;-)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to ship this post so I can go ship that e‑mail I’ve been craft­ing so I can final­ly ship myself some Zs.

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