As a matter of fact, as professional software developers, we always kept a distance from such assessments, learned all the platforms and remained agnostic. We believe that, no matter what platform you write code on, you have pluses and minuses and each technology / Operating System has its own perks and failures.
When the mobile platforms came up we were eager to see what each company provided as a frame work and what are the different pluses or minuses of them. We looked at all four major platforms, Android, iPhone, Windows Phone and Blackberry and identified the following four technologies as being unique to the Android platform.
1. Widgets
Widgets are little applications that display info on your smart phone's home screen. They look slightly different than the regular icons and, as opposed to them, they actually constantly communicate with the back end to display instant ever changing data. When you push on a widget the application that sits behind it usually opens up.
Fig. 1 Widgets
The most popular widgets are the weather and sports related widgets but there is lately a lot of development and customization on designing business widgets, i.e. such as the ones that give you updates stock quotes or updated sales data.
Widgets are important because they can be customized for your business needs and they can give you nice easy to access snap shots on important data that may help you make a decision or offer a solution (for example during a meeting).
2. Custom Roms / Custom Launchers
Custom Roms are basically modified/customized/enhanced versions of the Android Operating system that runs on your smart phone. Remember your phone is a full blast computerized platform with processor, memory and internal storage hence you can boot up with different customized versions of the OS like on any PC.
Most of the Custom Roms install either minimalistic / pure Android experience shells or graphically spectacular / enhanced skins. Advanced users love these "conneseaur" types of layouts but businesses can benefit too.
Fig. 2 Custom ROMs Galaxy S5
For businesses we recommend writing and installing Custom Roms centered around their business day-to-day needs: i.e. Roms for sales persons, Roms for customer service representatives, Roms for engineers, Roms for IT personnel. A well written Rom can de-clutter your Android and help you focused on your day-to-day tasks for increased productivity.
According to our research, none of the other three commercially available mobile platforms offer custom Roms (they are closed platforms).
3. NFC
Near Field Communication is a technology that enables two smart phone devices to radio communicate with each other when brought into proximity. The technology had been used for a while in Japan and South Korea mainly in retail and financial transactions such as ordering product from a vending machine or banking.
Fig. 3 Devices communicating via NFC
Over the last five years NFC is gaining more popularity in the US as well. There are a number of initiatives to design mobile apps that help with parking payments, shopping in grocery stores or simply apps that facilitate data exchange between two phones located in a few inches one from another.
Please note this technology is different than the Bluetooth or Wi-Fi technologies.
For some reason, even if the NFC protocol is basically available for all the platforms, so far neither Apple nor Microsoft gave it enough attention. Which leaves Android in a good competitive spot as the technology is definitely useful and it has a large spectrum of applications.
4. Multi-user
All the major competitors in the smart phones and tablets arena own a multi-user, multi-tasking Operating System. But for some reason it's only Android (starting with version 4.2) that currently offers a true multi-user platform for their devices. And even on Android this is just on tablets.
Having a multi-user system and being able to login with personalized screen layouts and apps is an important feature especially when sharing the device with somebody else. The reason is very simple: everybody likes to install something different and if you have multiple users installing multiple things on the same profile / account you will end up with a clogged home screen. Or with ... two clogged screens.
In our daily business endeavors we do see some business that share smart phones and tablets between multiple employees. We see that especially in different on call / IT support groups but also in sales and in customer service. In these types of situations having a multi-user environment definitely helps.
The conclusion is that, while Android started as an open source mobile OS, this Unix based platform offers some solid and unique back-end and front end features that other competitors do not offer.
Learn how to take advantage of these in your business.
Make it a great day!
Adrian Corbuleanu
Miami Beach, FL
http://wittywebnow.com
Note: I would like to thank my friend Marius Magureanu for his contribution to this article. Marius is an Android developer based out of Oslo, Norway.
Other sources used:
1. http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/widgets.html
2. http://www.redmondpie.com/best-most-popular-custom-roms-for-android-and-why-you-should-try-them-out/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_field_communication
