Times of desperation? Well, may be. In a rare scenario, Apple’s Senior Vice President, Phil Schiller, took a shot at Android OS saying it is a mere replacement for a feature phone and problems of multiple nature make it a not-so-wise choice for consumers. Phil shared data saying that a research firm ChangeWave found out that nearly three fourth of iOS users are happy with their devices whereas only around half of Android users are happy with their devices. Also, Apple’s internal research showed that almost four times as many Android users switched to an iPhone rather than an Android for their next purchase.
Google’s Android OS suffers from fragmentation and it a well known fact, it’s latest operating system, Jelly Bean, runs on a mere 16% of the devices even after almost an year of public release. It is very likely that most of the current Android devices will not even see an update to Jelly Bean in their lifetime. The one advantage for iOS devices over Android devices is timely updates of OS, Apple in general supports their devices for a period of three years and provides an update to all its devices at the very same moment.
Phil also said that the reason why Android is so fragmented is that different aspects of the OS come from different companies, may be he was pointing out to the skin atop of default Android OS. This one reason is enough for not so smooth performance on Android whereas Apple creates its own hardware and software resulting in a seamless integration.
“When you take an Android device out of the box, you have to sign up to nine accounts with different vendors to get the experience iOS comes with,” he said. “They don’t work seamlessly together.”
Recent statistics show that Apple has a market share of around 19% around the world compared to a near 70% for Android. But nevertheless, usage statistics of multiple kinds show that iOS devices still lead by a huge margin.