Joel Liu's Library tagged iPhone →  View Popular, Search in Google

There are times, of course, when you don’t want to share a photo widely with the world. But those are the exceptions. A better privacy model would be to make photos public by default and allow for a private mode with certain photos to be shared only with select individuals or a core inner circle. Public sharing allows for more serendipitous connections. But then Path would be just like every other mobile photo-sharing app. I’ll give it credit for going its own way.

Path doesn’t seem interested in making anything other than visual connections. You can’t even comment on someone else’s photo. It is oddly passive for a social app. You put up photos, see other people’s photos, and that’s it. No discussion allowed.

It's a shame Apple is so bad at cloud services itself.

Now show her the iphone 4 retina display.

The trick for Google is to introduce some standards that will make different Android phones more consistent. Hell, they could do the same thing for the hardware. Crank out a cellphone chipset that manufacturers can customize instead of rolling their own and then being 8 months behind the latest Android release, if even that! Then the variety of Android phones out there will be a true strength and not a weakness.

Granted, there are cases where this is useful, but it's a fundamental iOS / Android(/Unix) design choice. Android favors interoperation through APIs, iOS favors using one application for the job at hand.

The iPod Touch and iPad are the equivalent of Apple II's in schools and candy cigarettes when it comes time for kids to grow up and buy a phone. All their apps and games will be there waiting for them when they get one. This market is about so much more than phones...

For far too long the mobile market was fragmented. Windows consolidated the desktop market to create many more platforms and markets for people. Apple iOS is a common platform in mobile while the others are still pretty fragmented. Apple is looking to do the same for entertainers, developers, marketers etc. Once they open it up by selling at Wal-mart and get other carriers it will be a true test.

While Joe Consumer may not grok fragmentation, it definitely impacts his experience. E.g. the official Twitter app not being available on Droid or the Incredible, last I heard.

I don’t see Apple as missing the boat so much as taking their time to do things right. Just like copy-paste and multitasking. Patience for the polish, or yeah, go to Android.

To answer your question, iPhone will, yes, always lack features Android has, for the foreseeable future, but the experience is smoother and more consistent. Strictly in this sense, it it Android that will never catch up.

I was also one of the many loud voices complaining that I couldn't run backgrounded apps, but when you look at the HTC phones coming out right now running Android and full backgrounding, and you hear the stories of how the battery runs out by the early afternoon, you start to realize that, it is true, "it is easy to add <feature x>, but it is hard to get it right" (or whatever it was that jobs said in his announcements)

I'm not saying that the features in Android aren't impressive, they very well may be, but Apple's design decisions don't just go after "impressive", they try to go after "perfect", and sometimes getting features perfect means cutting them until you're ready

Your entire post is targetted as "features that developers want" and you're right, you need a healthy ecosystem of developers, and Google is certainly building one. However, you also need a healthy ecosystem of consumers who love the product, and at the end of the day, I really think most developers will go to the platform where they can reach the widest audience. Apple cares about their consumers first, and their developers second (and sometimes it feels like second last), but it seems to work for them...

I came out of WWDC thinking that Google may very well never catch up. They don't seem to care about Android like Apple cares about the iPhone. Apple cares enough about the iPhone to learn how to do cloud services (see Push) and advertising (see iAd) better than Google, things that Apple has no experience doing well. But Google doesn't care about Android enough to invest into build quality or UI, things that Apple does well.