Google vs. Apple – Control freak

Google’s days as a developer of open source software are numbered.

• With its future in Android now secure, Google has turned its attention to mitigating the biggest risk to its long term growth: Apple.
• Apple used its developer conference to refer to Android as a “toxic hellstew” that is both chaotic and very insecure.
• I find that there is merit in this statement but not as much as Apple would have us believe.
• Google has responded in a recent interview by admitting that the open source route is indeed much more difficult but has stopped short of admitting the real truth.
• I believe that the real truth is that Google aims to marginalise open source Android into a tiny kernel which has no impact on the user experience.
• RFM research (see here) clearly indicates that Google is hard at work addressing these issues and will do so by creating its own proprietary operating system on top of Android.
• GMS is currently the applications that sit on top of Android but over the last year Google has increased the scope of GMS significantly.
• Google is systematically removing functionality from Android, which is the open source piece, and placing it within GMS which is not.
• Hence GMS is getting bigger while the open source piece becomes smaller and increasingly less relevant.
• GMS is not open source and is in fact completely controlled by Google.
• I expect that over the next year or so this trend will intensify until Android is nothing more than a kernel with all the key functionality being coded in GMS.
• In effect, Google will have created proprietary OS (GMS) just like iOS or Windows.
• RFM research indicates that Google is doing this in order to fix the usability and security issues that make Android both less useable and less secure than either Windows Phone or iOS (see here).
• By having total control of user experience, it will be able to manage security as well as implement its own consistent user experience across all GMS devices.
• Effectively, Google will solve its usability and security issues in the same way that its competitors do: by having its own proprietary OS.
• The casualty here will be Android which will become so small that it is almost irrelevant in the user experience as are the kernels that sit under Windows Phone and iOS.
• This will further limit handset vendors’ ability to differentiate on GMS Android and also make it much more onerous to have one’s own version like Amazon and the Chinese do.
• Google needs to catch up with iOS and Windows Phone in terms of the user experience and this strategy will ensure it has the best chance of success.
• Google remains the only company likely to see any growth from Android and remains, alongside Microsoft and Yahoo!, the only stocks to look at in the mobile ecosystem.