It is going to be a busy fortnight in the tech industry, with WWDC kicking off yesterday, E3 on June 10th and android 4.4.3 releasing. And what comes with WWDC? iOS 8? Yes, but the funniest part of it is watching Apple try to claw down the ever rising Android with thinly veiled jabs and often mis-interpreted statistics.
Yes, Apple has attacked android again… this time in the form of percentages of fragmentation, malware and customer satisfaction. During the opening Keynote of WWDC, Tim Cook spoke about the percentage of customer satisfaction when leaving Android for iOS, was around 97%. Seems a bit desperate trying to get people to move…but thanks for the mention!
Next, he spoke about that he went on about android and it’s fragmentation. Only 9% of android users are running the latest version of android compared to 89% on iOS. Apparently, a third of them are still running software over 4 years old, which simply isn’t true. Gingerbread came out 3 and a half years ago and has 16% android share. Before that is Froyo which only makes up 1% and the rest don’t even rate. He also went on to say that the phones on older versions don’t get new features, which is partially true, however Play services are running on older phones like the original Samsung Galaxy S. While Apple maintains API levels across their devices, feature fragmentation affects iOS devices as well, for example Siri doesn’t run on any device before iPhone 4S.
Lastly, Mr Cook brought out the big guns, Malware. Suggesting that Android devices make up 99% of the malware affected devices in the mobile industry. Having 79% market share of the worlds MobileOS would certainly account for this, Microsoft themselves certainly know that being the largest target brings all sorts of problems.
But, Google has taken many steps to avoid malicious Apps within Google Play and in the Android eco-system as a whole over the last year or two. First they introduced Bouncer, to scan apps uploaded to Google Play and then added additonal layers of on-device security such as app scanning. And it seems to be working, Android’s security chief Adrian Ludwig, last year released statistics showing that from a sample of 1.5 Billion downloads of Android Apps less than 0.001% are able to evade their defenses and cause harm to users.
Apple is brilliant at this, marketing is their strong suit. And it is sure to work on a few people, but how many people of the general public watch WWDC? Apple is preaching to the die hard Apple fans. iOS 8 now in the open – at least as a Beta- so, what will Google bring to the table in a month at I/O? I hope it will be bigger than last years.
