Choosing a mobile OS is not an easy task. The mobile world is divided into Google Android, Apple iOS, Windows and a few up and coming players. The OS you choose will define the kind of app or website that you are going to build. The good news is when it comes to the mobile web, there isn't much difference from those players.
Smartphone OS Market Share
However, the difference between mobile browsers always comes down to three factors: hardware, application, and customizability. At the moment, Google Android has the highest market share, iOS has the most popular apps, while Windows Phone 8 and Blackberry OS 10 lag behind.
Style and simplicity are the main indicators of iOS, which comes with iPhones and tabs. iOS has a very simple, logical, and consistent design throughout the OS, and the home screen contains a grid of movable icons. The built-in applications of iOS are well designed and user-friendly, the new iOS version includes Facebook and Twitter integration, built-in video chat, and the Passbook virtual wallet.
The best strength of iOS is the massive collection of apps and most probably it has the best app store in the market. Most of the time app developers choose their primary target as iOS, and Apple offers the industry's best collection of books, music and TV to its users.
Google Android's best strength is that the OS is available on more phones and more carriers than any other mobile operating system. As an Android user, people have a wide range of device selection, and they can pick whatever they like, touchscreen to the physical keyboard, and any shape to any size.
The latest Android OS has the same or more number of features than iOS, and the OS can be easily customized. Compared to iOS, the user can easily edit the home screen and can add widgets, favorite contacts, or usual arrays of apps with ease, which makes the Android home screen experience really powerful than iOS.
The user can find and download hundreds and thousands of applications for every possible scenario in Google Play Store, and most of them are free. Also, many developers use Google Android as their playground, so sometimes it may contain some security issues as well.
Microsoft's mobile OS has the balance between iOS' simplicity and Android's customizability. The main feature of this OS is live tiles, which are preprogrammed squares that the user can easily rearrange it as they desire. Windows Phone 8 has inbuilt Facebook and Twitter and works brilliantly with Microsoft Exchange, MS Office, and XBOX live to game.
However, compared to iOS and Android, Windows mobile OS gets a lower score. This is because of limited hardware options and limited applications availability than iOS and Android. The operating system uses the Bing search engine, which scores well behind Google's on accuracy and features.
With Blackberry's new OS, the user can access a universal inbox that has all the e-mails and social-network messages with ease. It has an efficient and clean interface in the OS, mainly focusing on communication and messaging, and it already has more than 100,000 apps. However, some of the popular and useful apps from iOS and Android are still missing.
The OS home screen, customizable to some extent, is similar to Android and Windows mobile OS, but the user cannot add widgets or contacts as icons the way the user can on Windows and Android. Blackberry has the best touch keyboard in the market, and their design is much easier to type on.
Blackberry has a Web kit-based web browser, and it uses technology from Torch Mobile. The browser has a private browsing mode, desktop mode, and it uses Bing as the default search engine, but the user can change it.