Gimmicky features are making their way into more and more smartphones, with the likes of Samsung adding things that not many people would use, such as Eye Tracking. Apple’s Senior Vice President of Design, Jony Ive, has said that Apple’s not in the game of just adding features to look feature-rich.
In an Interview with Bloomberg Businessweek Ive said “we didn’t start opportunistically with ten bits of technology that we could try to find a use for to add to our features list.” Although he also pointed to the TouchID sensor as being particularly hard to implement. “There are so many problems that had to be solved to enable one big idea,” he said.
Jony Ive, nor Apple’s head of software Craig Federighi mentioned any of Apple’s competitors by name, but Federighi did add that “New? New is easy. Right is hard.”
Tim Cook was also in the interview, and when the topic of Android came up, he was keen to brush off the success of the operating system. “Does a unit of market share matter if it’s not being used?” Cook asked.
There’s not denying that Android has become the world’s most prevalent operating system, being found on more devices than any other operating system in the world, but Cook claims that people just aren’t using their Android devices. “When you look at things like customer satisfaction and usage, you see the gap between Android and iOS being huge,” he said.
Android also has a huge problem with fragmentation, a problem Cook was keen to point out negatively affects developers and consumers alike. Cook claims that Android users are “using an operating system that’s three or four years old.” and likens it to “having in my pocket iOS 3. I can’t imagine it.”
Source: Bloomberg Businessweek