Is Android the Linux of the mobile world?

The more I see and read about the Android Platform, the more I believe it will become the equivalent of Linux in the PC world. A platform preferred by geeks and techies due to its customisability and open source architecture, but shunned by the average punter who very quickly gets overwhelmed by the openness of it and puts it straight in to their ‘too hard’ box.

I had been having these thoughts for a while now, but after seeing this clip, I am pretty confident that my statement is accurate.

“The best applications aren’t here yet. They’re going to be developed by developers like you…”

Sure, right now we are talking about a platform that isn’t very old and has a lot of growing to do. This video in particular was advertising the prize they’re offering to clever little developers who do code up the applications that will define what the Android platform becomes. But at the crux of it all, your average punter doesn’t understand open source, or care about the possibilities of a completely open architecture. They just want a phone that’s easy to use and works.

The iPhone has enjoyed incredible success, mainly beause it was designed from the beginning to do specific things, but do them in a way that was very intuitive and worked in a way that simply made sense. Having just a few buttons on the device increased the level of simplicity to a level that most people were comfortable with.

Android however isn’t designed for a single piece of hardware. Already there are at least five devices I can think of that have been built to support the platform and from what I can tell, they all behave differently. Some have iPhone-esque touch screens, others prefer to go with more of a Blackberry nub and miscellaneous navigation buttons. Some also go for the full qwerty keypads.

As a website designer and someone that’s had a shot at designing websites for mobiles, I know how difficult it is to try and code for half a dozen different browsers. Multiply that by 30 different screen resolutions. Multiply that by 1000 different input interfaces and you can see just how problematic Android could become.

How do you design something for a device that may or may not have the button or interface you need for your application to work? Even when trying to figure out how much screen real-astate you have and how big or small the text needs to be becomes a massive problem.

Then there’s the rest of the world who can and probably will end up saying “90% of my clients use iPhones, Blackberry’s and Windows Mobile – I’ll code for those. If users are smart enough to know how to use Android, they’ll be smart enough to figure out how to use my application or view my website.”

Which is very similar to Linux. No-one want to do expensive user-testing, research and evaluation and devote weeks of development time on a platform only 3% of their market uses, so they remain unsupported. While they remain unsupported, there won’t be any consumer confidence in it. While there is no confidence, there will be no sales and without sales, they remain unsupported.

I don’t know what it will take to make Android a success. It could be a single device that will rule them all, it might be an application that simply revolutionises the way we use our phones, or it might just never work at all.

What I will go on the record as saying however is that in its current form, with its variety of devices and at least from my perspective no solid drive towards perfecting the user experience, its just not going to cut it.