The Apple iPhone OS Vs Google’s Android – A Comparison

As of February 2010, Google claims that almost 60,000 cell phones with the Android operating system is shipped everyday. With the vision of building a versatile platform that will power several mobile phones, the Open Handset Alliance unveiled Android, an open source mobile phone platform based on the Linux OS. The first phone to run Android and that was made commercially available was the HTC Dream. Since then, the contrast in approach both by Apple and Google to the cell phone market has been in the news.

Fast forward to 2010, Apple just recently released the iPhone OS 4 in response to the Android’s 2.1, where the ability to ‘multitask’ has been the primary feature offered, and that is already available on phones using Android.

Where the Apple iPhone scores big is in its marketing, target audience and being able to provide the complete package through the iPhone App Store, where the iPhone has almost 100,000 apps for its users while Android has around 11,000 so far. Ideologically speaking, since the Android caters only to open source advocates and developers (which are not necessarily a large part of the market), Apple has successfully targeted its iPod and retail customers and Mac OS X developer base as well for the iPhone.

Another big plus for the iPhone is that virtually all apps will run on any model of the iPhone while the older Android phones cannot install newer versions of Android, and that seems to a big ding.

On one side, you have the ‘openness’ of the Android, and on the other, you have Apple’s strict standards in offering a finished product. Who will win?

Only time will tell, though.