A security writer, loyal Android user, and self-proclaimed Apple-hater, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, explains why he's saying goodbye to Android:

Google still has very little control over software updates, and Android users are basically at the mercy of their carriers and phone manufacturers when it comes to getting updates or new operating system versions. For example, it took Sony more than six months to push Android 5.0 Lollipop to its new line of Xperia Z phones, despite the fact that it had promised for a much shorter turnaround after Lollipop was released by Google. Just for comparison’s sake, when Apple released iOS 8 in September of last year, it immediately became available for all iPhone users, even those with an 2011 iPhone 4S.

As security expert Cem Paya put it, that was a conscious decision Google made when it created Android. Paya called it a Faustian deal: “cede control over Android, get market-share against iPhone.” Basically, Google was happy to let carriers put their bloatware on their Android phones in exchange to having a chance to fight Apple for in the mobile market. The tradeoff was giving carriers and manufacturers control over their Android releases, leaving Google unable to centrally push out operating system updates.

Some carriers and manufacturers are better than others, it’s true, but they all pretty much suck when it comes to pushing updates. There really isn’t a better way to put it.

As security researcher Nicholas Weaver put it in a (now deleted) tweet, ”Imagine if Windows patches had to pass through Dell and your ISP before they came to you? And neither cared? That is called Android.”

Some people look at the mobile landscape as a battle of brands/fanboys: Google vs. Apple.

Some people look at it as a battle of ideals: open vs. proprietary.

But really what it boils down to is a battle of execution. With a closed, proprietary system, Apple is able to execute their vision faster than anyone else. When Google wants to push security updates or new features to all Android users, they simply can't.

Benedict Evans:

Facebook is trying to co-opt the next Snapchat. Yes, the smartphone is a social platform that makes it easy to use multiple social apps, but you still have to get someone over the hurdle of installing the app in the first place, and they have to get all of their friends to install it too so that they have someone to send to. Facebook is trying to bypass that - you can drop your content straight into the existing Messenger install base (600m MAUs). Now just one person can get a cool app and send messages to their friends even if their friends don't have it, and if it's cool enough they can tap on the link and install it too.

This is super powerful stuff.

My biggest gripe about today's social apps is 99% of the time, they don't provide any value to you unless your friends are signed up. Even after that, your friends have to be active for it to be any fun. It blows my mind how many social apps still haven't figured that out.

One app that did figure it out was Instagram. In the beginning, they included the genius feature of posting your photos to Twitter and Facebook as you posted to Instagram. So even if you were one of the early adopters of Instagram and didn't have any friends on it yet, that was okay — just push your photos onto Twitter and Facebook for your friends to enjoy. From there, Instagram's early growth was just purely organic, piggybacking on the social graph you already built on Twitter/Facebook.

I'm really excited about this for Facebook.

As for Apple and Android, I'm wondering if they will ever bake something like this directly into their operating systems. How would the mobile apps landscape change if you could get value from an app without even having to install it? What potential security issues would arise? How would shady companies try to exploit this? Could this possibly kill the web as we know it today?

As Benedict repeatedly says, the landscape of mobile computing is still in flux. For all we know, in the next several years, saying "I downloaded an app from the App Store" might not mean anything like what we know today.

Tim Bajarin:

Qualcomm is using ultrasonic waves to scan all of the ridges and wrinkles of your fingers. Why ultrasound? Qualcomm says it can do a far deeper analysis than the 2D image created by a fingerprint mashed up against a capacitive sensor. It can look beyond the grime and sweat on your fingers and even penetrate beneath the surface of your skin to identify unique 3D characteristics of your print. It’s the same biometric technology developed for government security applications, Qualcomm told me.

Qualcomm execs said the technology could also change the way fingerprint scanners are implemented on devices. Since ultrasonic waves go through glass, aluminum, steel and plastic housings of any phone, they don’t need a dedicated touch pad or button to work. In fact, depending on how it is implemented, you could conceivably touch any part of the smartphone with a finger to gain access to the phone itself. This could make it possible for smartphone makers around the world to be more creative in the way they implement two factor authentication in these devices and will go a long way towards making all smartphones more secure. In Qualcomm’s scanner, high-frequency acoustic waves penetrate the dermal layer of your skin to extract your unique print, down to the ridges on your skin and even your sweat pores. Since sound can travel through things like sweat and other elements, your daily maneuverings don’t get in the way of capturing that perfect print. In fact, condensation generated from your regular activities may actually improve the scan, making it a more reliable method than the current capacitive technology.

Assuming this works as reliably as it sounds, it looks like Qualcomm's fingerprint scanning solution is a leg up above Apple's Touch ID. Sweaty hands and dirty fingers happens a lot more often we'd like to admit, requiring you to make the extra effort to clean them before using Touch ID.

Also, because ultrasonic fingerprint scanners can be placed anywhere on the device, industrial designers will have a lot more freedom.

Neil Cybart:

Samsung was more focused on mentioning key words such as design, hardware, camera, and mobile payments, instead of discussing why certain things were being done or removed from the phone. This lack of clarity has been Samsung's problem for years as the company has mostly relied on offering consumers choices that other smartphone makers decided not to pursue. The problem is Apple is now selling larger screen iPhones, and Xiaomi and other local Chinese smartphone vendors are selling decent hardware at lower prices. Samsung's differentiation has disappeared. Samsung may not be at the point of utter desperation, but they certainly came off as remaining quite nervous. Samsung says they want to be first in mobile, but they show great discomfort in leading.

Ben Thompson:

Apple is on the verge of leaving the narrowly-defined smartphone market behind entirely, instead making a play to be involved in every aspect of its consumers’ lives. And, if the importance of an integrated experience matter more with your phone than your PC, because you use it more, how much more important is an integrated experience that touches every detail of your life?

In fact, if there is a flaw in this vision, it’s that even pulling an iPhone from your pocket is too cumbersome. What if you could interact with your home, your car, retail, the cloud, or even your own body with something even more personal and accessible?

Phase I — Build a killer product that people will love.

Phase II — Build a killer software ecosystem around it.

Phase III — Build a killer hardware ecosystem around it.

Phase IV — Build your next killer product that will eventually succeed your current killer product.

This is the perfect way to visualize the current smartphone landscape. While Apple has "only 20%," it completely dominates the premium end. Android dominates the rest of the current installed base (mostly the mid-range). The low-end market is all up for grabs.

Ben Bajarin brings up the important questions for Android going forward:

Google has a base of rapidly maturing customers (just over a billion of them) who will continue to expect innovation around the platform in areas they consider valuable. Areas around cloud, imaging, sensors, and so much more. Android’s current user base is increasing in their sophistication. As computing advances, so should Android for this customer set. Yet, in this next phase, Google is going to also want Android to appeal to a first time smartphone user, say a farmer in Africa, for example. So the question is, how does Google evolve Android to cater to both their most sophisticated, demanding, and profitable existing customers, and a first time customer in Africa who is absolutely not PC literate and may not be literate at all? This creates a fundamental problem at a platform level and at a business model level, for Google. This is why I say we can’t make assumptions about which platform will win with the next two billion. The user base in question is using feature phones today. They make calls and have type literacy around 10 key and or radio/TV dials. This is the extent of their technical literacy with electronics. It is in addressing this next phase of mobile where I believe the Android schism happens.

Could it be an Android fork like Cyanogen has the most potential in this next phase? Could it be Windows Phone has an opportunity? Or maybe a web platform version like FireFox OS, that simplifies everything to web apps? Or perhaps Google figures it out, or comes up with something completely different than Android to address this new set of customers. The point is, we have no idea. It is a green field. It is uncharted territory for computing.

John Gruber:

The conventional wisdom just two years ago was that Apple needed to create a low-priced iPhone — not just lower-priced but low-priced — to compete in “emerging markets” like China. That would be true if Apple were interested primarily in market share. But they’re not, never have been, and never will be interested primarily in unit sale market share. Far from hurting them, Apple’s commitment to the premium end of the phone market is helping them separate from the pack in China.

When talking about Apple's market share, there's a big difference between saying "only 20%" and "the top 20%."

Benedict Evans:

One way to look at this is that iOS and Android have been converging - they arrived with more or less the same capabilities despite starting from opposite ends. Apple has given up control where Google has taken it. And of course Google has had to add lots to Android just as Apple had to add lots to iOS (and they've generally 'inspired' each other on the way), and just as Apple has added cloud services Google has redesigned the user interface (twice, so far).

But the underlying philosophies remain very different - for Apple the device is smart and the cloud is dumb storage, while for Google the cloud is smart and the device is dumb glass. Those assumptions and trade-offs remain very strongly entrenched. Meanwhile, the next phases of smartphones (messaging apps as platforms and watches as a dominant interface?) will test all the assumptions again.

Thomas Fox-Brewster, Forbes:

Android smartphone owners who aren’t running the latest version of their operating system might get some nasty surprises from malicious hackers in 2015. That’s because one of the core components of their phones won’t be getting any security updates from Google, the owner of the Android operating system. Without openly warning any of the 939 million affected, Google has decided to stop pushing out security updates for the WebView tool within Android to those on Android 4.3, better known as Jelly Bean, or below, according to appalled security researchers. That means two-thirds of users won’t receive cover from Google, the researchers noted.

The WebView piece of the messy Android jigsaw allows apps to display web pages without having to open another application. Many apps and ad networks use the component, which the Google Android team even advocates in its developer documentation on rendering web pages. It’s also the favored vector for attack for nearly any remote code execution vulnerability in the mobile OS, according to Rapid7 engineering manager Tod Beardsley. “WebView, for many, many attackers, is Android, just as Internet Explorer [Microsoft's browser] is usually the best vector for attackers who want to compromise Windows client desktops,” he told Forbes.

Software weaknesses have repeatedly been uncovered in Android and WebView, making the lack of updates even more dangerous. Rapid7 has added numerous exploits to its penetration testing kit Metasploit. The most recent version comes with 11 different WebView exploits bundled in, meaning both ethical and criminal hackers could easily exploit the tool and subsequently Android operating systems.

This is the part that really sucks about having such an open platform. Too many hardware choices = too much hardware diversity = too many devices running different versions of the software = too much fragmentation to maintain a secure and consistent experience.

Open doesn't always win.

Tim Bajarin:

Another way to think of this is that smart phones or pocket computers connecting the next two billion people to the internet is similar to what the Gutenberg Press and the Bible were to the masses in the Middle Ages. Before the Gutenberg Press, knowledge and control of the people was in the hands of a select few who controlled the flow of information. As a result, they lorded it over the populace and made them beholden to the church or more educated authorities who ruled them. But once the Bible and other documents could be dispersed to a larger audience, those authoritarian rulers were challenged and eventually marginalized as more and more power went to the people over time.

Steve Jobs was wrong. The iPad isn't the most important thing he has ever done; the iPhone is.

And Samsung was right. The next big thing is already here — smartphones.