TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Michael Mistretta just published a thoughtful article on his misgivings with Android, and he makes two excellent points.

First:

An open platform may have worked had there only been a single device. But Android is a multi-year project that will encompass a wide scope of devices with hundreds of varying user interfaces. Touchscreens to trackballs to keyboards to accelerometers. How can 50+ different phones made by different companies with different interfaces possibly function with apps in the Android Market?

Mark my word, three years from now, the Android Market will be a mess. Users will download—or even worse, purchase—an app, only to find that they have no way to interact with it because their phone lacks a touchscreen. Think there are a lot of flashlights and tip calculators in the AppStore now? Wait till you see the Android Market in 3 months.”

This illustrates a central problem with Android as a platform in the sense an iPhone is a platform: the “Android Market” is tacked on. Android’s intent is to be flexible enough to run on a multitude of devices with widely varying hardware. But this diversity of user interfaces, as Michael points out, is why an application store on Android phones doesn’t work that well: how do you account for applications with specific hardware requirements (e.g., “this app only works on phones with a touch screen,” or “…only works on phones with an accelerometer”) in the application store while still retaining a simple store design? I don’t want to wade through long lists of applications which aren’t even compatible with my phone — I only want to see applications that work with it.

One solution is for the application developer to specify certain criteria phones must meet, and if the phone doesn’t, its store will not display the application, but think about the upkeep involved in maintaining this system. The developer must specify explicitly what their application requires, and the Market must keep and update profiles for each phone of what it is and isn’t capable of. It’s begging for a poor user experience.

An OS which is designed to be run on a variety of devices with different configurations simply doesn’t work that well with a unified application store. That’s a trade off being made, and a rather large one on a handheld device, where ease of use is ultimately more important than features.

Second:

The iPhone was marketed as an iPod, a smartphone, and an internet communicator. Now, third-party applications can also be seen as a major selling point. With the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack, dedicated video player, and desktop syncing, the G1 is hardly a media-centric device. It barely compares to the iPod. Surprising for Google, the G1 has a significantly laggy web-browser with a clumsy UI that leads to a lackluster mobile internet experience. That leaves the phone side of things, which I haven’t seen a single screenshot published to date.

The G1 — and any Android phone, really — is not a media-centric device. Period. As Michael points out, the G1 lacks a 3.5mm headphone jack, a built-in video player, and desktop syncing.

Google is betting on developers to make up for Android’s inadequacies, but the experience will be poor, because it isn’t integrated. It isn’t just that the audio application is poor and it has no video application. The issue is media wasn’t a focus in developing Android, so its support is a half-hearted attempt.

In contrast, the iPhone is a very simple concept: a phone, an iPod, and an Internet communication device. It has three functions, and it does the last two really, really well, and the first good enough. Just consider the music experience on the iPhone. The user can buy music, TV shows and movies, and subscribe to podcasts on their computer, and buy music on the iPhone, too. All of this media stays in sync effortlessly. All the user does is sync it whenever they have new media, and iTunes transfers new media to the iPhone and vice versa.

Once the media is on the iPhone, it is all accessible through one application, the iPod. Users can listen to music and podcasts, and watch movies and TV shows, all through this one application. And because this application is one of the device’s main focus, it’s very well-designed. It’s a joy to use.

To put media on the G1, however, users must enable mass-storage in the phone’s options, then hook the phone up and manually load media onto the micro-SD card. After they’re finished, they must disable mass-storage — because if they don’t, the G1 will not be able to access the card. Then they have to hook up a USB-to-3.5mm adapter and use separate applications for audio and video, all in a subpar user interface.

With the iPhone, you drop it in its dock and let it sync. It’s as close to seamless as anyone has ever gotten.

And with an Android phone, we’re back to the pre-iPod and iTunes days for managing our music collections. If there is one single reason I will not own an Android phone, this is it.