Android also continues to face problems created by Google. The core strengths of Android are supposed to be its openness and status as a freely available operating system. But those aspects are also its core flaws.
When adherents talk about Android’s market share, they forget that Android isn’t a product, it’s a technology portfolio. Android’s popularity doesn’t benefit Google in the way that Windows made Microsoft extremely rich. Google gives Android away, and in some cases pays hardware makers to use it. Pointing out that lots of phones being sold use Android is like saying that a large number of smartphones are black. So what?
As soon as white or silver or woodgrain becomes more fashionable, devices will shift. The same applies to their core OS. The problem for Google is that, unlike Microsoft, it has done little to establish Android as a de facto standard or necessary piece of the puzzle. Had Google pushed a strong, centralized UI the way Microsoft did for Windows, at least customers would begin to recognize “Android” as something they thought they needed. They do not today.
Microsoft’s unification of branding, UI, and APIs meant that PCs couldn’t really be sold without Windows. Today, anyone can put together their own OS and deliver a phone, just as Palm/HP, Nokia, Samsung, and RIM’s Blackberry are doing. Google hasn’t established a strong platform, it just co-opted Java and made a half-hearted attempt to set up an app store that hasn’t achieved the same sort of industry-changing influence as Apple has.
Partly, that’s because Google isn’t catering to customers who actually want to pay for things. It’s attracting users who don’t want to pay for anything, and want the freedom to bootleg and hack. That demographic is not really attractive to commercial development for obvious reasons.
There’s no reason preventing Motorola or HTC from shifting to another operating system once Android begins to lose its allure, just as there was little holding either back from switching from Windows Mobile to Android a couple years ago.
Of course, the other problem for Android is that Oracle is now focusing on Java as a core asset, following its acquisition of Sun. And that means it is not just taking legal efforts to force Google to pay for its use of Java-related IP, but also that it is partnering with IBM to develop open source Java independent of the now to be abandoned Harmony, the software Google borrowed for Android.