Sundar Pichai, the chief of Android division at Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) answered the criticisms of Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) against the search engine giant’s operating system during a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek.
According to Pichai, Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s Android is innovating faster compared with Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL). According to him, some of the great features recently announced by the iPhone maker have long been available on Android.
“Apple announced lots of great things in their keynote. They also announced things we have done in Android four or five years ago, [such as] third party keyboards, richer notifications, and widgets. These all happened in Android such a long time ago. If you step back and take a holistic look, I think any reasonable person would say Android is innovating at a pretty fast pace and getting it to users,” said Pichai.
Apple and Google are incomparable
He made the statement in response to Cook’s criticism that the majority of Android user are still running the “ancient versions” of the operating system without the newest features. He emphasized that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) are incomparable because they are doing different things.
He pointed out the fact that Apple is manufacturing two models of iPhone for consumers to buy while Google is shipping thousands of devices worldwide. He added that Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) is releasing new version of Google Play Services every six weeks, and 90% of users are on the new version.
Pichai said, “It’s not apples-to-apples [comparison]. It’s a platform layer we ship independently. In some ways, we move the platform faster than anyone else and provide a consistent layer for developers.”
Android adoption is faster than any other OS
Pichai said great number of people are adopting Android than any other operating system in response to the comment of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) that many people abandoned Android and switched to iPhone. He said,” We are doing remarkably well.”
Different manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (LON:BC94) (KRX:0059935), HTC Corp. (TPE:2498) among others use Android OS in their mobile devices– the main reason behind its dominance worldwide.
According to a recent report from IDC, Android is expected to account 80.2% share of the smartphone market worldwide by end of 2014. The firm estimated that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) would capture 14.8% market share.
