Android Circuit: Blackberry's Misguided

Taking a look back at seven days of news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit includes Apple Music arriving on Android, the failure of Android One, a review of the Nexus 5X, Google’s smartphone manufacturing plans, the BlackBerry Priv reviewed, TAG Heuer’s Android Wear smartwatch with a twist, Android Wear sales estimates, and eleven killer Android Marshmallow tips.

Android Circuit is here to remind you of a few of the many things that have happened around Android in the last week.

Apple Music Arrives On Android

It was promised before the end of the year at Apple’s Developer Conference in June, and now it has arrived on Android. The beta version of the subscription music service from Cupertino, Apple Music, is now available to download in the Google Play Store. But the goal that many people thought this app had – to lure people from Android to Apple – seems to have backfired with the UI choices.

Anyone looking for streaming music on Android is likely already using a service. Once more you have Spotify and Pandora, alongside Google’s own offering of Google Play Music. Apple has to bring users from those services over to Apple Music to make this an effective approach. Open up Apple Music and do you find the Apple experience, do you find everything that makes iOS a popular OS?

No, you find an app that follows the Android style guide from Google, that acts like every other app, and hides its Apple-ness very effectively. Google has the confidence to ignore the iOS conventions when it writes apps for iOS, why has Apple not followed suit?

Apple Music in general seems to be missing a solid purpose beyond ‘do the same as Spotify and Pandora’. It really should be aspiring to something bigger. 

Android One Has Failed

Google’s Android One project was set up with three fixed reference deigns for manufacturers to use, and Google taking charge of software and OS updates over the air. Now that both of those features have been handed back to manufacturers, is there any point in going with Android One, as opposed to a regular Android smartphone? Android One offered a handful of locked-down reference designs with common components, software support that was managed by Google, and a chance to increase the margins on low-cost smartphones in many new markets around the world. The power in the first two elements has been lost, and that removes the financial incentive of the third element.

What was once a promising Android initiative to bring  level of quality and support to low-cost Android devices now looks like little more than window dressing over the regular Android offering.