Smartphone Wars

With the announcement of new models of iPhone and as a long time consumer of Apple products, I thought it was about time that I became acquainted with the market leader (in terms of numbers sold): The Android Phone.

Essentially smartphone buyers have two main choices: Buy Apple at a considerable premium and join Apple’s ecosystem with its walled garden approach to apps and services or buy an Android variant which, at the budget end, is considerably cheaper but is effectively locked in to Google’s world.

I have recently had the opportunity to use a Motorola Moto E 2nd gen 4G smartphone and pit it against my now nearly 3 year old iPhone 5. First impressions were good, really quite good. The 4.5 inch screen, a whole 0.5 inch bigger than my iPhone 5, was bright and clear and the phone responsive. Most of the apps I used on the iPhone were available in some form for the Moto E through Google Play and installed without fuss and worked well.

So clearly I had fallen into the trap of being an Apple fanboi and had been wasting my money all these years on keeping Apple’s shareholders happy. Google’s free operating system and the wizards at Motorola (now Lenovo) had produced a perfectly adequate phone for less than a quarter of the price I paid for my iPhone 5.

Or had I? As I started to become familiar with Android, I noticed a number of frustrating limitations which impacted on the user’s privacy and security.

Firstly, having read recently of Stagefright and other security vulnerabilities affecting smartphone OSs, I was keen to update my new Moto E with the latest Android 5.1 which would keep me safer. Trying to do so through the phone I was told that the installed OS 5.0.2 was up-to-date. Not so according to Motorola’s website which informed me that 5.1.1 was available for the Moto E, though the company’s chat support could offer no date as to when the update (first released in November 2014) would be available through OTA in the UK. Contrast this with Apple whose iPhone users update rate is much faster and easier.

Google themselves are reasonably quick at issuing updates for Android but the need for these to be tailored for the hundreds of handset variants and to get these to customers through manufacturers and often via carriers means that improvements can take many months to reach consumer’s phones if they ever do. What incentive is there for manufacturers/carriers to spend money on maintaining last year’s model when they can sell you this year’s?

Another frustration is the way Android handles app permissions. In iOS, permissions for things like notifications and location can be changed through Settings on an app by app basis. However in Android you are shown what permissions an app will demand on installation but are given no opportunity to change these through the OS either at install time or subsequently. Apps are available to allow tweaking of app permissions but these seem to be hard to use and unpredictable in outcome.

I tend to buy apps from different countries which may be restricted to local app stores. In iOS I can do this by having more than one iTunes account and switch between them as required. Not an ideal situation but manageable. However in Android, at least using Google Play, app availability seems to depend on location determined by IP address regardless of which Google account you are using. This means resorting to a VPN to spoof country of origin to just download regionally restricted apps.

So will I ditch my expensive addiction to Apple iPhones? Probably not yet while the competition seems to provide a product that shortchanges customer’s privacy and security.