Google’s Android seems unstoppable right now. It’s the biggest mobile OS in the US and it just surpassed Symbian in India, a country where Nokia have reigned supreme for many years. It’s hard to imagine that this flight toward total market domination could crash and burn any time soon, but there are indications that Google could lose momentum in its fight to stay on top.
The first indication is the obvious one. Where Apple is keeping its, rather large, share of the mobile market with only three phones, Google has Android on hundreds of phone. So even if Android is the most used mobile OS in the world, it’s only due to the very large support from mobile phone manufacturers right now. Google will have to make sure that they stay happy with their choice of Android, and many of them do manufactur phones with others mobile OS’s.
The next two indications both come from what we have seen and heard about Andorid 4 (ICS). First installment is Android 4 as a mobile OS. Despite the fact that everybody that have tested it says it’s the best version of Android by far, they also state that it’s still not at easy to use as iOS. The learning curve is a lot steeper on Android and will discouraged a lot of users from picking Android as their next Smartphone OS. The other learned fact is that Google with Android 4 decided to focus on the mobile experience and leave the tablet part of the OS mostly like it was on Android 3.2 (Honeycomb). The reason this is bad for Google is because Android 3.2 never gained traction against the iPad, mainly because it’s maybe even harder to learn then Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), and that is not a good place to be. So where Apple is adding important new features in their latest release iOS 5.0. Google is still trying to fix the user experience with their release, Android 4.
Next up is the eco-system Google has to offer. Google has a mobile OS, a tablet OS and a desktop OS, just like Apple and Microsoft has. On top of the important three OS’s Google has an impressive amount of services. So what is wrong?
The OS’s
Microsoft has the biggest desktop OS, Apple has the biggest tablet OS, and Google has the biggest mobile OS. The problem is that Apple’s desktop OS is doing quite well, Microsoft is building its tablet OS on Windows, and nether of Google’s other OS’s is doing any business.
The services
Google has the biggest search engine, Apple has the biggest music and app store and Microsoft has the biggest gaming platform. The problem is that Apple either has, as good a service or hooks into Google’s service better than Google does and Microsoft owns the platform for cooperate use.
The future in the mobile space is going to be all about the eco-system. Not just in app, music, movie and book purchase, but also access to the content you created or bought. Here Google only have Android as a mobile OS to deliver this experience to the costumer. Apple has iOS that are a success on both the mobile and tablet platform, and they have MacOS the desktop OS of the second largest manufacturer of Personal Computers. Microsoft owns the desktop both for the consumer and the business user. They are soon launching Windows 8 that manage to tie together Windows, Xbox Live, Windows Phone and the Windows server platform.
If the future is all about the eco-system, Google is going to have a hard time explaining to their OEM’s why they should stay with Android. Logically none of them can get into the Apple eco-system, but most of them knows the Microsoft eco-system and could easily change. Some of them might even think that it’s better to try something new, and go with WebOS or something else.
The bottom line here is that Google, if they want to stay on top of the mobile OS game, also have to focus on the tablet and desktop experience. They need to get developers to make great apps for tablet Android, kind of like that Google is doing on ChromeOS. I know ChromeOS is dead in the water, but that might just be because it’s a little ahead of its time. They need to make sure that they deliver top-of-class integration into their own services, way better than Apple and Microsoft, and they have to make sure that they or third party developers deliver near perfect integration into the Microsoft server platform. They have to fix the first time user experience and update the UI to better guide the user, and they need to make sure that an Android user can easily get to music, movies and books without having to turn to Amazon and the Kindle Fire. Then Google will be able to stay on as the biggest in the mobile OS arena.
