5 Ways Android Won Me Over - InformationWeek

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asksqn,
User Rank: Ninja
4/29/2014 | 5:00:00 PM

Closed source creep

All very valid reasons to use Android except that what many people think of as "Android" actually falls into two categories: the open parts from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which are the foundation of Android, and the closed source parts, which are all the Google-branded apps which the company has been using a reason to lock down what was once open source.

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bwalker970,
User Rank: Strategist
4/14/2014 | 2:38:17 PM

Five Ways That This Article Fails to Make the Case that Android is Better than iOS

The article fails to make any measurable comparisons between Android and iOS.

1. No app on either Mac OS or iOS normally runs with administrator privileges. iOS apps never run with administrative rights because that it how the OS was designed. The only way that a Mac OS app can execute a task with adminitrator privleges is by asking the user to enter a password. It has been that way since the beginning. On a desktop OS, users sometimes need to perform administraive tasks and Mac OS provides one of the most secure interface for allow that.

2. That is the way iOS handles background apps. But, rather than "quietly closing" an app, iOS notifies an app that it is about to be put to sleep. The iPhone 3G had only 128 MB RAM. The original iPad had 256 MB.The iPhone 4s has 512 MB.

3. Sandboxing is required for all iOS apps and for any Mac OS apps that are sold through the App Store. In iOS, the user can revoke access rights at any time and access rights are requested when access is attempted, not all at once when the application is being installed.

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder

5. So what of it? Android has copied many things from iOS not the least of which was the overall user experience. Google developers were on a far different design path in the for Android before the original iPhone debuted. Just because iOS used a few good ideas first seen on Android does not make Android better than iOS.

Android is a mobile OS so, naturally, if your measure an OS against mobile feature priorities, Windows will fail miserably. But, which platform would you rather use for video editing or application development?

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bwalker970,
User Rank: Strategist
4/14/2014 | 1:57:01 PM

Re: Android wasn't the first to multitask

iOS always had multitasking. They simply chose to limit the amount of multitasking and background capabilities available to apps in order to preserve battery life. They specifically did not give apps free reign to use unlimited background processing.

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Brian.Dean,
User Rank: Ninja
4/12/2014 | 11:29:05 AM

Re: Android: Love it or hate it?

Agreed, an OS can be better than another OS in terms of security but that does not mean that users should begin to ignore best practices in security. Antivirus software etc should still be maintained, ports should be monitored and the main gate (passwords) should be secure, if not then even the most theoretically secure OS would be useless.

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kennysahrnubo,
User Rank: Apprentice
4/11/2014 | 5:27:14 PM

Re: Android wasn't the first to multitask

We stand corrected! Android is the first major/modern mobile OS to have multitasking. iOS didn't get multitasking until version 4 in 2010. Interesting comment, you got me to read up on those operating systems.

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kennysahrnubo,
User Rank: Apprentice
4/11/2014 | 4:48:03 PM

Re: Android: Love it or hate it?

Jon,

You are definitely right that every OS is only as secure as the user. Why do my video games need my contacts lists and so on, as you suggest. Android permissions are a work in progress and there is much to be done.

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JonNLakeland,
User Rank: Moderator
4/11/2014 | 2:48:47 PM

Re: Android: Love it or hate it?

I hate to return to the old "Windows has more malware because it has more users" argument in a new guise, but if I was going to write malware it would be for the phone OS that has overwhelming market share - Android.

I do agree about being largely theoretical security though. When you install or update an app and it lists the permissions the app wants - I check it, because my degree is in IT Security, and I want to know what doors I am opening. My wife, parents, and friends at large, however, just accept it every time as a unimportant step in getting into the new program.

Any OS can only be as secure as the user.

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addicted2088,
User Rank: Apprentice
4/11/2014 | 2:37:03 PM

Android wasn't the first to multitask

The thing about Android being the first mobile OS to have multitasking, far from it. Symbian, Maemo, MeeGo, all had it, Symbian having it since before 2000. Symbian could launch a hell of a lot of apps and keep them in the background thanks to its low memory usage (up to 40-50 apps on 512MB of RAM on Symbian Belle on the Nokia 808 PureView, while Android has extremely high RAM consumption for apps, and that's memory used by an app, not memory used by the OS to cache apps for faster startup.) And they would be active as well, games would continue to load, file explorers would be doing their work, while on Android you'll see no game loading in the background (though that's a good thing considering how battery hungry Android is). Same with MeeGo, which could handle up to 20 apps in the background at some times in just 1GB of RAM, with two HD games included. So no, Android was not the first, and it also wasn't one to do it very nicely given how fast apps would be killed and how much RAM usage was.

I like Android, but again, that's false information. It should say "first modern OS to have multitasking."

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Thomas Claburn,
User Rank: Author
4/11/2014 | 1:41:40 PM

Re: Android: Love it or hate it?

Android may have more under the hood in terms of security tech, but that's theoretical security. In practice, Android phones seem to encounter malware far more often than iOS devices due to Google's hands-off review policy.

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vitorcavalcanti,
User Rank: Apprentice
4/11/2014 | 1:06:43 PM

All about security

It's funny to read that. In Brazil many CIOs dislike Android devices because of the security issues and invest more on iOS and some of them on BlackBerry. But even though I'm not an Android user right now (used to be, but had many trouble with my Samsung devices), I do agree to the marjority points that you have listed on the article.

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