The rise of Android

Just over a month back we were told that Google has cumulatively activated 200 million Android devices, rapidly closing in on the 250 million+ iOS units Apple has reported.

How many of those remain in play?

I strongly suspect that many more early Apple devices remain "on the road", and the operational current count heavily favours iOS.

Rapid Obsolescence

I currently have four Android smartphones. The original HTC G1 and Magic+, a Nexus One, and a Galaxy S II. Add two Android tablets (a viewSonic gTablet and an Acer Iconia A500).

The HTC G1 and Magic+ inhabit the bowels of some drawer somewhere. The Nexus One sees periodic use only when my oldest son wants to watch some YouTube videos on the couch and can't find my S2. The gTablet is derelict, while the A500 sits broken.

I have six Android devices, five legitimately activated through Google, of which one sees real use. Many early Android devices were, in many regards, the Hyundai Pony's of the technology world, quickly rendered unusable or with limited resale value.

Speaking of which, resale value is a good indicator. Early in the era of the Magic+ I considered selling it to get a better device, my hopes dashed seeing Craigslist jam packed with people trying to do the same, pricing down to "not worth the trouble" prices. At the same time the few used 3GS units were barely discounted from retail price.

The same was true of the Nexus One, the Galaxy S, and various other Android devices. The resale value just isn't there, and I suspect that rather than supporting a robust second-hand device market, most simply got abandoned.

The same certainly isn't true of the Apple devices. I would wager that the overwhelming majority of Apple devices from the 3GS on are still in use, whether by their original, second, or third owner.

Like a Toyota, the value (and corresponding resale value) is still there.

Supporting Metrics

All of this is just speculation. Further, it's from someone who loves what Android has become, and what it represents. Android is big enough, and successful enough, that we don't need to hide from this reality.

There are some metrics that support the hypothesis. Look at the Facebook metrics for iOS versus Android - 79 million monthly average users on the former, versus 45 million on the latter. Despite having some 80% of the reported activated base of iOS, Android only sees just 56% of the Facebook use.

Vast differences between the demographics might explain the usage difference, but if that were the case then it should actually skew things in favour of Android: it is the platform that is preferred by younger adults where Facebook use is saturated, while iOS has primarily taken off in the 35+ realm.

It isn't demographics. Any nonsense about people getting Android phones and using them as dumb-phones ring ridiculous.

Among devices still in use I would guess that Facebook usage rates are similar. It's simply that tens of millions of Android devices are no longer in play.

Which is a number far more relevant than the gross sum of ever activated devices. Tell us how many devices are still in use, and strive to keep that number as high as possible.

Windows Phone 7 is a flop. Instead of reversing, or at least staunching the flow of customers leaving Microsoft's mobile platforms, the bleed is worse than ever.

So what gives? So many pundits tell us that it's a great device. That it's the best option....if for some reason you don't want an iPhone.

Which, as they say, is the rub: The people who love Windows Phone 7 are almost universally iPhone boosters, and they love WP7 as the non-threatening, adorable little scramp that they hope will distract the Android legions. The regular cheerleading squad is at play: Marco Arment, John Gruber, MG Siegler, and others of the "Apple profits are righteous" gang.

They love Windows Phone 7 because it legitimized the iPhone by making an almost identical set of philosophical platform choices. The few areas where it differs are often facile. Windows Phone 7 comes from multiple manufacturers, for instance, but the hardware is so strictly defined that the differences are minor, the advantages of the competitive spirit extinguished.

It turns out that if you want an iPhone, there is a company that already does a really good job making one.

Whatever misdirected soul has demolished all of Microsoft's once legendary advantages, desperately trying to out-Apple Apple, needs to be punted from the company. This strategy will not and cannot work. When the people who supposedly love your product, giving it endless praise, are people who would never buy it, you're doing something wrong.

Gizmodo Is The National Enquirer of the Tech Industry

From Gizmodo's email blast last eve-

If you have any decently modern Android phone, everything you do is being recorded by hidden software lurking inside. It even circumvents web encryption and grabs everything—including your passwords and Google queries.

So I went checking, actually hoping to find this villainous software.

My Galaxy S II - No Carrier IQ.

My wife's Captivate Glide - No Carrier IQ.

My Nexus One - No Carrier IQ.

My peer's new Razr - No Carrier IQ.

I expect little from Gizmodo, but such a fundamentally unproven claim — so trivial to dismiss — really sets a new low.

But they're hardly alone. This whole story has been an exercise of hysterics and technical ignorance. Even on self-purportedly enlightened sites like Hacker News, the dominant opinion is superficial, lacking any real curiousity or discernment at all.

Why I Don't Fear Carrier IQ

If I did find the software on one of my devices, I can't say I'd be overwhelmed with fear.

The "security researcher" — realize that the media invents professions and credentials when they need a stooge to prop up a story without legs: when the WSJ ran with some domain stats I had gathered, they declared me the "world's preeminate domainologist". In reality my interest in domains started and ended with the fact that it was a large set of data usable for an index tutorial — became aware of the daemon on his Sprint phone while using the logcat tool available in the Android SDK. This is a tool run by millions upon millions of devs.

His observation actually wasn't unique, and the service had been noted and dismissed by many other devs using Sprint Android handsets over the prior year. He was the first, it seems, to announce unsupported, hysterical conclusions, the drama escalated when Carrier IQ poured fuel on the fire by sending him a heavy-handed cease and desist, which they later retracted (though I suspect that this whole episode will end in some large libel lawsuits against very sloppy organizations like Gizmodo).

He wasn't using a "packet sniffer". He was using the most rudimentary debugging tool that Android developers use, whereupon he found this software literally announcing its presence and what it was doing. Basically the exact opposite of hiding itself.

"But it records your keystrokes!" you say. There has been zero proof of this thus far. What has been shown is that the daemon software intercepts keystrokes, proudly announcing its achievement into an in-memory ring-buffer log. I suspect — with zero proof — that it uses these events to populate basic aggregate data such as "uses the keyboard heavily". Nor has it been shown that any of this data is actually transmitted to Carrier IQ beyond aggregate statistics.

Where are the logs of this activity? The history of your keypresses and your web activity? This is brutally easy to find, if it exists. Find it and become an internet hero.

But I doubt you will. Know why? Because the legal landmine that Carrier IQ would find itself in, operating in one of the most heavily regulated industries around.

It goes against intuition that they would record, much less transmit to themselves, this information when it would represent enormous liability. Perhaps I'll be proven wrong, but I highly doubt it.

Nothing that has been found contradicts exactly what Carrier IQ stated in their public announcement. All of the purported proof otherwise is a demonstration that most of the people manning the keyboards of the tubes don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about.

EDIT - 10:28PM - I've gotten a few emails deriding my "douchey" tone, in particular that I scarequoted "security researcher". I did so intentionally: Tech news has gone down a path of stupidification where nothing is validated, and where an expert opinion is drawn from the most rudimentary, superficial analysis. Looking at logcat entries does not make a security researcher — it makes a log dabbler.

In any case, Carrier IQ has spoken up regarding the issue, explaining pretty much exactly what I guessed above. Do you have to trust them? Perhaps not. But their explanation is entirely rational and in line with the service they provide.

EDIT - December 5th - Quite a dramatic narrative change has occurred. Now instead of being on every newer Android phone, it's actually on a subset from two US carriers (AT&T and Sprint). Further it isn't "recording" your keystrokes, it is, perhaps insecurely, logging a subset of details to the in-memory ring-buffer log (which is not "recording"). A nefarious app — if it requested and was granted the READ_LOGS manifest permission that startling few apps have — could exploit this sloppy logging.

Goodbye Flash

Even the mainstream media is reporting on Adobe's announcement that they're retrenching from Flash on mobile. While Adobe's statement is wishy washy and half-hearted, the outcome is certain: Flash is dead.

Flash is dead on every platform, including the desktop. Flash on mobile was a zero financial return activity Adobe took to try to extend the best-before date of the technology as a whole. As it fades away the whole stack becomes questionable.

Increasingly there is one web as the days of the mobile romper-room draws to a close. While client specific limitations remain, my smartphone is more capable than some desktop browsers. Binning by the physical size of the device isn't reasonable (and is almost always unwelcome, which is why many smartphone users now spoof their userAgent to avoid such web crippling).

If Flash is a no go on many of the web's consumers, it makes no sense for any of the web's consumers. If you have HTML5 resources and implementations at the ready, why would you ever publish a synonymous Flash resource? The answer in practice today is for economic segmentation: Many sites demand a subscription to access the HTML5 resources, temporarily taxing iOS users. That isn't sustainable.

My Position On Flash

More than a few have emailed me with what amounts to a "nah nah told you so!" victory dance. Apparently some took a prior missive I wrote as pro-Flash. How they came away with such a fundamentally incorrect interpretation is open to serious question.

Nonetheless, technically Flash works on mobile, perhaps simply because the devices finally caught up to its demands. On the Galaxy S II it plays simply brilliantly, without an ounce of hesitation or strain. It really, actually works.

Nothing Steve Jobs said about Flash — his position motivated by the lucrative (in more ways than the obvious) app store — was proven right by Adobe's financial predicament and resource refocusing. Steve Jobs fulfilled his own prophecy, however, helping to hasten the demise of a derelict technology.

False Prophets

Flash sucks. Flash sucks slightly less, however, than exclusive ghettos for single platforms, leaving alternatives and the spirit of competition out in the cold.

And let's be real -- Many of the false prophets of HTML5, cheering the loudest over Adobe's announcement, boost HTML5 half-heartedly as a proxy in a fight they should have little interest in. These usual suspects take every other opportunity to cheerlead native apps over web apps.

Save us your fraudulent cheering.

A new intelligent thermostat is making waves, heralded for its gorgeous design and intelligence.

It's going to fail miserably. It will sell in limited numbers to the few looking for something new and interesting — a conversation piece to bore guests with — but it's a partial solution searching for a problem.

People who have difficulties with programmable thermostats don't care about learning thermostats. The claimed energy advantages are almost certainly overblown, as they generally are with energy efficiency products: A modern insulated home has temperature inertia that sees limited benefit from anything short of vacation mode, and certainly sees no benefit over the hypothetically miniscule advantage this might provide over a standard "business day/night cycle" pre-baked programmable thermostat cycle.

Add that people who have the sort of schedule it could learn are exactly the sort of people that a bog standard programmable thermostat, of the hundreds commercially available, caters to perfectly. The people who don't aren't served by this product.

But it's a very interesting initiative, and the brains behind it will hopefully evolve into more interesting and more commercially viable solutions.

These are the offshoot benefits of the smartphone war: Displays, processors, RAM...it is astonishing how inexpensive incredibly powerful solutions are now, coupled with a low power draw that makes them viable and embeddable in everything. I have derelict smartphones stashed away in drawers that would demolish the expensive embedded solutions we used to drive critical systems just over a decade ago.

Years back a peer and I did the initial steps of a "startup" in exactly this space. We contrived the name "tenom", with our imagined logo being Monet's signature rearranged (not sure of the legality of such a repurposing), the second idea being the bar code representation of ten Ω (get it? tenom...ten ohm? I was so proud of myself). We were in the embedded computing market and it was obvious that the home as it was lacked intelligence. We wanted to give it some IQ.

Our imagined solution included occupancy sensors, switched ducts with area HVAC control, and integrated security. We spoke with some builders and it was fairly obvious that it wasn't going anywhere: the markup on a home to implement the solution had a baseline in the tens of thousands of dollars, but worse most buyers simply didn't care.

Technology has come a long way since then.

Now your HVAC controller can actively monitor current and coming weather conditions to, essentially, "prepare" (flush the home with exterior air during a cool night and then seal it up as the sun rises, or vice versa). Rather than rudimentary light and proximity sensors, it could know where every member of the household is simply by the fact that many carry a smartphone nowadays.

It could monitor our calendars, hook into our Google Latitude accounts, all to proactively prepare for ideal conditions the moment the first of us arrives home.

And of course people are doing things just like this right now with homegrown solutions. Embedded control boards are a pittance now.

The future is wild. Inexpensive, fantastic quality displays/touchscrens and high performance but miniscule power processors ensure that it will be a rich experience.

Preparing a home for sale — in a household with four young children running on an already hectic schedule — has proven to be the toughest month we've ever endured. In one month we've done more than I ever imagined possible. Our workload was made much tougher by our dedication to give the buyer a quality home where no corner was cut or compromise made, and I will be very glad when this whole process is behind us.

I've written a lot about smartphones over the past while. It's a topic that I get more passionate about than I need to. I've tried to pull away from the discussion but it keeps pulling me back in.

It is a discussion that matters. It really, really matters. It is the most important technology shift that has happened in years, and it will have, and is already having, a very strong influence on this industry.

But the primary battle is over. The war is won, with users victorious.

This is true regardless of the smartphone platform you choose to embrace, whether iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, or other.

There was a brief period where service providers and application makers felt that the market had become uniplatform: If you wanted to watch their movies, listen to their music, do banking, match colours, and so on, they only needed to cater to one closed platform. It's no surprise that many of them were overjoyed with this situation at the outset (before it was turned against them), as it makes life simpler.

It also threatened innovation and competition.

That lock is broken. It is a thing of the past. No longer does one platform reign supreme, and the new reality of a multiplatform world is established and will be going no where anytime soon.

We all win. Even if you prefer the previously dominant platform, you win as you can be sure that the innovation and pace of improvements in their product are heavily motivated by the competition.

It is a fantastic world that we live in. We're in an amazing place.

Where do we go from here?

The iPhone 4S looks like a fantastic device: An incredible GPU coupled with a powerful dual-core processor, high density screen, and the surprisingly robust functionality of Siri comes together to deliver a very slick device. Apple will sell them in the tens of millions

Since it's unveiling, however, quite a few have questioned why Apply didn't bump up the screen size. Some of the popular competitive devices have larger screens (while others have smaller screens, but such goes a market where people choose devices ideal for them), so many expected Apple to respond in kind and grow the device from the size it adopted back when 3.5" was actually a pretty huge display.

They didn't. For whatever reason they stuck with 3.5"(*). Some declared it a weakness.

Never fear, though, the Ex Post Facto squad is here to save the day. They're ready to tell you that a small screen is not a competitive weakness, but instead is actually a universal strength. Once Apple let the cat out of the bag, the hordes started defensively building justifications for why a 3.5" screen is not just good — which it most certainly is for a large class of users — but rather that it is, in fact, superior to other options for all uses for all users.

Larger screens are undesirable, they say, because they project a need to compensate for a small penis (this is seriously one of the arguments, taking a breather from its traditional utility in making jealous people feel better about people having nicer stuff), they're like the tail fins on 1950s cars, or they're too large for the single use case of walking in a parking lot while using your device with one hand.

The last one astounded me not for its irrational position — such ridiculous claims are a dime a dozen, especially among the cottage industry of "I own an iPhone and now I'm trying an Android device and thus I am an expert on mobile devices and my complaints are righteous" — but rather that it actually gained traction across the net: I've seen it linked and held as if it were a scientific truth on countless sites.

Ignoring some technical flaws in the presentation, it opined that because the smaller iPhone is arguably more usable for one-handed on-the-go usage, at least in the pre-voice recognition era, that validates the design as a work of brilliance.

But what about every other usage model. 99% of the time that I use my device I flip it to landscape mode and type with both hands, enjoying a large, clear, sharable-if-I-want display that doubles as a navigation device. Don't those uses count? Doesn't that invalidate that irrational claim right at the outset? Isn't it just as brilliant and considerate for makers to satisfy those needs as well?

A modern smartphone has a lot of uses. You choose the size of device based upon how you use your device, not because someone is desperately trying to rationalize the heavenly design of one single option.

* - the iPhone features a 1.5:1 aspect ratio versus the 1.66:1 screen on most competitor devices. This is how the Galaxy S II, with 7.8 square inches of screen space (38% more than an iPhone 4's 5.65 square inch screen) is just 12% wider than an iPhone 4. What this means in practice is that maintaining that aspect ratio while growing the screen leads to a quickly chubbifying device. To grow the iPhone screen to 4.3" would increase the device width, assuming a similar bezel, to 15% larger than a Galaxy S II (or about 75mm wide). I would guess that Apple would rather gain resolution independence in their API before growing the device, with which they can start to vary the aspect ratios.