Backing the Losers

I have a weird prescience when I start to look around at the mobile phone market of today. Today when searching for tutorials on NSUserDefaults (don't ask) for some reason a forum conversation came up *on the Android forums* entitled "With Android on the rise, do you think that Apple's iOS is dying?".

You can read this scintillating spar of wits here.

Now, given that it is bound to be a highly biased forum, and it's unlikely to look good for Apple, I was quite surprised to find a certain amount of levelheadedness. The most forgiving arguments stated that the user used both an iPhone running iOS, and an Android-running smartphone. They found iOS to be good, and unlikely to fail, but that they preferred Android.

And absolutely right too! I find it ultimately strange that anyone should ask the (very leading) question about whether a competitive product to that which they are presumably backing is in any way "dying". I find it even more baffling that anyone should back any corporation in any sort of irrational way. The fact is that person A likes the phone for these reasons. Person B likes their phone for other reasons. As consumers we manage to do these corporations huge justice by being almost violently loyal, and for what?

What do you gain ultimately from 'poo-pooing' the competition of an enormous multi-national corporation. I'm looking at you, Apple Users, and you, Android Users equally - is the world really that black and white, that one must be an Android User or and Apple Fanboy, and one of them is in someway Right?

The reason this suddenly brought about my ire is that this has happened to me before, but ridiculously, the other way round. I have been an Apple fan for years. Yes, I did have this irrational hatred for everything non-Apple in my teens. I sat there with my LC475 and my PowerMac II and looked on at my friends with their DOS machines and their crappy Windows 3.1s thinking "ahahaha this is much easier to use" and secretly hating them because they also had the spectacular shoot-em-ups Doom 2, Heretic and Duke-Nuke 'em, and I had to go round to their houses to play on them.

In many respects, I am so happy that Apple didn't sink into the pit to which it was headed. Steve Jobs did play a blinder and I can now open my MacBook Pro in my department unashamedly, and see several other macs spring to life around me, wielded by my colleagues. If they hadn't, I would have supposedly "lost" and had to spend my life typing miserably into a Windows machine and looking glumly as my previous mac-hating taunters laughed in my face.

I have since, I would like to think, grown up. I'm not saying I would have necessarily bought a PC if I was back where I was and wanted to play a game, but I do now own an XBox, the purchase of which I viewed as my final admission that yes, PCs and Microsoft are better for games in general, and as that's what I wanted to do with them, that's what I bought the XBox for, and I'm very happy with it, just as happy in fact as I am with my Apple MacBook Pro for everyday use.

And then the iPhone happened, and sorry folks, but it was awesome. There had been touchscreens before, oh yes, (in fact I got on of the first brick-thick 3g smart-phones, unfortunately not the touchscreen one though) but absolutely nothing like the iPhone, and predictably within months competition sprang up everywhere. Where Apple had the edge though, was in iOS, which itself is quite simply Mac OS X, very slightly stripped and very much as functional. Years went into its planning, and the phone became a computer, with phone capability, and months and months of thought went into the multi-touch interface, and how he user would interact. It could not have been a more perfect or innovative launch.

That's what gave iOS its lead in the market, and rightly so, and since that launch several years ago it's had time to mature and fix a number of bugs and problems, and sells in huge quantities. Appropriately enough, games are really great on it, and it appears to have become the next Microsoft of the smart-phone market.

And now the Android operating system finally bursting forth on equivalent hardware, after having years been developed on less capable phones, has become the Apple that I so fervently backed in my teens. I freely admit that I have not used one of the larger touchscreen Android phones like the Evo. My significant other owns an Xperia mini x10. It seems nippy enough, and looks good. The operating system I personally find to be a bit ugly (8 bit icons, glary wallpaper, non-anti-aliased text), and seems to put functionality over usability (my girlfriend had significant trouble setting it up) however, it's a marked improvement over other smartphone systems such as the blackberry, and I can believe that the operating system focusses more on the general functionality of Linux in the same way iOS takes from the OS X, however "being a phone" seems to be the main central point (and why wouldn't it be).

Which is fine - to me non of this matters. Loads of different factors come into play when choosing the products that you buy, and essentially the question you should always ask is "does this phone do what I want to do, in the way I want it to, and do I enjoy using it" - the answer to those questions is very rarely answered by phone sellers, who talk about screen size, chip speed, broadband speed and all those things, and there have been so many times when I've walked out of a shop with a phone that just does not do all the things it says on the tin. I chose the iPhone because I know, and I'm right, that it does exactly what I want it to do, and what's more with pizzazz and zeal. It is a quality product, and I am extremely happy with it.

But what I would never do is go onto a forum and decry all android phones for being rubbish - I just don't see the point. What would I gain from that? Nothing - the only reason I can possibly think for it is phone envy. That's right - back then when I supposedly hated PCs and entered into the Flame Wars of yore, it's because, deep down inside, I secretly hated the fact that a) they seemed to be really good at some crucial things that the Mac at that time wasn't, and b) They were WINNING, with a market share far and away beating Apple, to the point where they could basically blow up a whole office of PCs through some bug and still be more popular by a scale of hundreds to one. I was essentially Backing the Losers.

So, Android users of that forum, in summary, it appears that Apple are at the moment "winning" in this strange war that you've decided to bring upon yourselves. Backing the Losers is admirable in one sense, and in every other sense completely pointless. Just enjoy using your phones for what they are. That is all.