Low —rent district of the mobile platform, at the bottom of the Android food chain, suffering the slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune, the onset of malware onslaught, the Android landscape decimation, on to second-rate future. These are some of the term used to describe the current state of Android.
On Google Android
Google Play’s quality as we all know is depleting with a zillion apps in their app store and no quality control whatsoever. Navigating the store to find the best apps is a herculean task in itself. No wonder that the Amazons and Samsungs of the world are bringing their own spin to this open source platform to make it their own. Amazon for example recently launched a beta version of an API enabling Android developers to place Amazon-based ads in their apps. Samsung is pursuing the mobile enterprise market with SAFE which aims to deliver corporate-grade devices on the Android platform.
On Android
In its semiannual mobile device activation analysis, Good reports that nearly 77% of devices activated by its corporate customers in Q4 2012 were powered by iOS, up from 71% in the fourth quarter of 2011. Android’s already modest share of the enterprise mobile OS market actually declined in Q4 2012 to 22.7% from 29% in the year-ago quarter.
Android also continues to draw the most malware threats with 79% of all mobile malware in 2012 a steep spike from 10% in 2010. Apple iOS on the other hand drew only .7% of all mobile attacks. Security definitely being a key point of Apple.
The fragmentation does not bear good news for Android either with Google hardware partners like Samsung and HTC deploying their versions of Android. So now they are a zillion versions of Android floating around which causes severe brand confusion.
How can Google Android save its ecosystem?
Well, there’s a lot Google can do. As Collin Gibbs mentions in his blog “Will Google Become the Slumlord of the Android”, Google can create an “uber-Android ecosystem. For one, it can start with creating “private channels” to distribute custom built Android applications — this it has already started to do. Google should work with new manufacturing businesses to develop gadgets that are more tightly integrated with Android than another other hardware vendor can build.