One of These Operating Systems Must Go

It’s been a weird week for smart phones. Blackberry manufacturer Research in Motion has been in the news for its inadvertent role in helping rioters in the UK coordinate their looting sprees. Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android, meanwhile, have increased their global market share to 62% of all smart phone sales, displacing Nokia and RIM from the top spots. And even though Apple’s sales account for only 18.2% of global smart phone sales compared to Android’s 43.4%, Apple is the company making the most money from its sales.

While this blog has long been an advocate of the positive effects of massive phone distribution, the negative effects are now manifesting themselves in equal force. The “Arab Spring” owed much of its success to the ubiquitous forces of social media and smart phones, but in those countries protests were mainly peaceful. In the UK, the widespread looting has been largely disconnected from a coherent political message, and is definitely not peaceful or civil. Added to this, however, is the notable incidence of a particular brand being associated with a thuggish uprising. Blackberrys have a special user-to-user messaging feature that enables instant messages to be sent across a private network. This has made them the device of choice for rioters and peaceful protestors alike.

The strange reality of profit margins, meanwhile, creates another potential socioeconomic branding classification. Are iPhone users inherently more affluent as a group than Blackberry or Android users? Closer analysis reveals that Apple’s profit margins are due to the fact that the company owns both the OS and device, whereas Google only owns the Android OS. However, now that private messaging has been used to such ill effect, will this prevent these companies from adopting similar technologies on their devices?

The answer is: probably. Up until now, smart phones have garnered more press for their ability to deliver information to remote areas of the world, such as poverty-stricken farmers in Africa. Now that they’ve so effectively been used as weapons of collective disobedience and unforgivable violence, expect stricter legislation and a corresponding backlash from application developers and programmers. Of course, this is partly why “jailbroken” phones are so popular. Legislation can’t change user behavior, or quell ingenious hacking schemes. In the long run, it may be easier to fix the inherently flawed operation of political systems than demand an impregnable smart phone OS.