In this day and age, apps rule. Apps are what make or break a mobile plat­form. It is their abil­ity to trans­form a mobile device into some­thing new, use­ful and enter­tain­ing that makes them so impor­tant. There are two giants in the app arena, iOS and Android.

iOS, the oper­at­ing sys­tem which pow­ers the iPhone, has many apps on it’s back. So many apps in fact, that it has more apps than all the other mobile oper­at­ing sys­tems com­bined — about 300 000 and ris­ing. Android comes sec­ond with about 100 000 apps which is an equally stag­ger­ing fig­ure. Clearly, you can’t go wrong choos­ing either one of these — but which is bet­ter? Android and iOS are very dif­fer­ent OSs, each with their advan­tages and disadvantages.

Lets start with iOS

The qual­ity of iPhone apps is pos­si­bly the high­est on any plat­form. Even Steve Woz­niak agrees. That’s expected — iOS started the whole app move­ment. A recent report has indi­cated that there are more games for iOS devices than for all the game con­soles ever in his­tory — com­bined. That’s insane! So, given the attrac­tive user inter­face and a bag­illion apps, is the iOS plat­form the winner?

Well here’s the prob­lem. There are only a hand­ful of iOS phones and they are all made by Apple — it’s just the iPhones. There are no choices, it’s either you have one of these devices, or you have no iOS phone. The iPhone  isn’t with­out faults. It’s a closed plat­form — every­thing is con­trolled Apple. Apps have to go through Apples strin­gent approval sys­tem before they can see the light of day. Stan­dards such a flash are also not sup­ported by the iPhone. To add to that, it doesn’t come cheap either.

What about Android?

Android on the other hand is quite the oppo­site. It is with­out any of the men­tioned flaws that the iPhone has. The plat­form is open, there are many devices that run the OS and just like Apple, there are many apps all cen­tral­ized in a sin­gle app store. So that means buy­ers have a choice; whether you’re look­ing for a phone with a good cam­era, on tight bud­get or look­ing for a gor­geous dis­play — the world is your oys­ter. Surely this would make Android the bet­ter choice right? Not quite.

Android is evolv­ing fast, maybe a lit­tle too fast. So fast that the device mak­ers can’t keep up with the lat­est builds. It takes a lot for devel­op­ers to develop, test, opti­mize and doc­u­ment every­thing for every new build of Android — it’s imprac­ti­cal for many. As a result, many Android devices are stuck with the Android builds they had at launch. A lot of times, devices are launched a ‘gen­er­a­tion’ behind. All of this results in frag­men­ta­tion. Cur­rently, the lat­est Android build is ver­sion 2.2 aka Froyo. Only a few devices released in the past few months have or are ever going to get Froyo. Peo­ple who bought the Sony Eric­s­son XPERIA X10 just got the promised firmware update they’ve been wait­ing for — an upgrade to Android 2.1. There is zero hope that they will ever get Froyo accord­ing to forum dis­cus­sions. If they do, it will come a while after Android 2.3 aka Gin­ger­bread has been released. This is Sony Eric­s­son fail­ing to keep up — smaller com­pa­nies prob­a­bly have it worse.

So, what’s the big deal with frag­men­ta­tion? A recent post by Rovio, the com­pany that brought us the ever-so-popular Angry Birds, summed it up. In sum­mary, because of frag­men­ta­tion they are con­sid­er­ing mak­ing a ‘light­weight’ ver­sion of Angry Birds for older hard­ware and for devices that don’t have the lat­est Android build. Another devel­oper, id Soft­ware, devel­op­ers of Doom and the new iOS game Rage, said that com­pared to Android, the iOS envi­ron­ment is “still much, much nicer”. Funny thing is, iOS came before Android.

I’ve said before that Apple allows it’s devices to age much more grace­fully than any other mobile plat­form. My first gen­er­a­tion iPod Touch, which I still use as my main MP3 player, stopped get­ting updates recently — after 3 solid years. In just a few months with Android, you can be left in the dust.

Enter Win­dows Phone 7

WP7 is more like a hybrid of Android and iOS in some regards. Microsoft con­trols the hard­ware — they choose the proces­sor, RAM, but­tons and screen res­o­lu­tion amongst other things. This is much like the way Apple has the iPhone — they call the shots — they choose what the phone is made up of. Also like Apple, Microsoft con­trols the UI — car­ri­ers and man­u­fac­tur­ers are lim­ited in the way they can cus­tomize the user expe­ri­ence — at this stage, all we’ve seen are cus­tom apps. Like Android, sev­eral man­u­fac­tur­ers have a shot at mak­ing their own hard­ware. The buyer has more options in terms of pric­ing, taste, inter­est etc.

That said, WP7 is still new — some say it is in fact pre­ma­ture. It doesn’t have as many apps as the iPhone or Android for that mat­ter. The vari­ety of devices is not as broad as Android’s. The qual­ity of some apps is excel­lent — on par with iOS offer­ings — whilst oth­ers are just poor ports.

Win or win