I will preface this ground breaking article by proclaiming myself both an Apple-fan and a Google-hater. I do like some Google stuff like YouTube and Google-fiber, but let’s save why I dislike Google for another time.  This preamble would not be complete without my declaration that I have never even owned an Android product. However I am willing to stipulate for the record that Android is as functional, useful, utilityish and versatile as Apple’s IOS and possibly more so in many cases. (Albeit quite ugly)

Android has been a phenomenal success. The sales are incredible and they have become #1 while hurdling the obstacle of being second-to-the-party. Android adoption continues to grow and everyone agrees it generally gets better and better. This doesn’t sound like a failure.

The Android experiment was not built just to be a competing operating system to IOS. It was novel, an open platform to be built upon and improved upon by major manufacturers and anyone with a good ideas. That was the experiment, can we build a better OS by making it open to the world. On a basic level, the failure becomes clear when we look at how everyone prefers pure android and not the garbage affixed to it by Samsungesque manufacturers. But the disappointment is greater than that. The same independent (non-Apple) developers who made the iPhone a significantly better device by adding their ingenuity via applications were now supposed to take Android to the next level. Many of us had hoped for more than phones, we wanted the OS to infiltrate technology. Here, It’s free, now go make something great!

We got shit from 3rd party people, nada, zilch, zero. Android is a full OS, it could be stripped down and combined with a crap screen and pottered into a fridge, or you can add to the OS and attach it to a robot. Android was a major ingredient for many new technologies and no one cared.

I want some kid in a third world country on a castaway 2009 MacBook and Android to build the next big thing. We got enough from the Amazon, Google and Apple think factories. Instead I see IOS getting more like Android and Android getting more like IOS. Are all the great minds wasting time thinking up new addictive games for my phone.  Enough with the apps engineers.