OSNews

Many people have bought Android phones on the recommendations of one or more of those tech connoisseurs, and from personal experience I know many that will never buy another, simply finding Android too confusing / complicated / inconsistent / unstable. Despite the rhetoric bandied around here, my personal approach is to tell people to go try out both, without the assistance of any salesperson, talk to non-techy people that they know who own one or the other, and make up their own mind. By a large margin those people have gone the iOS path.

The proliferation of Android phones has been driven purely by the carriers and marketing. The same thing happened when the carriers pushed Blackberry. iPhone came along, they pushed that, it became successful because it was simple yet powerful and feature rich compared to other offerings. But geeks wanted more and Apple wouldn't give it to them, so they stayed away in droves and lapped up Android when it came along. Many of those geeks work at phone retailers, and they sell Android phones on the back of their enthusiasm for it's power user features - things that the majority of the population would never use, and on Android couldn't work out how to use even if they wanted to. Just walk into a phone retailer and listen to them prattling on about multitasking this, tethering that, setting up a hotspot and customising your home screen, but ask them how to set up the device for visually impaired users or sync'ing it with your current iPod based music collection and they have a meltdown.

And the real giveaway is the tablet market. No carriers pushing it, after all there's bugger all dollars in it for them, and iOS is smashing Android despite there being about 10:1 advertising in the other direction. So again I ask, what has Apple got to be scared of? Anyone looking at this logically just sees a company doing what all companies who actually create anything do to protect their investment. If Google was in the business of creating, or should I say making money from their creations and not just from selling advertising, they'd be doing exactly the same thing.