With the recent news that Android phones are outselling phones running the iPhone OS in the USA in the first quater of 2010, I wanted to write down something that I have been ranting at my more patient friends for the last few months. The open development platform style of Android is like evolution, whilst the closed Apple platforms are more like intelligent design.

• Apple periodically come out with a single near-perfect product.

• Android products get incrementally better with each iteration from each phone company.

• Apple must make every product a hit - they can't afford failures like Apple TV. Failures are very expensive for Apple.

• Android allows Google to outsource failure. Infact, failures by the 3rd party companies who make Android phones actually help the evolution of other Android products as all products in that class can learn and benefit from the mistakes of eachother. This is like the transfer of genetic information. Failing phones are part of the survival of the fittest style of interaction that occurs in nature.

• Like the traditional Mac platform strategy, the iPhone strategy is about elite, expensive, "cool" devices with fantastic usability.

• The Android strategy is more like the PC platform of years past. It will result in a wide choice of generally uglier phones that don't work as well as the iPhone, but that slowly get better and better. Everyone will use them anyway, much to the confusion of die-hard Apple fans. This will be because market pressures will ensure that the cheapest phones of the highest quality, which give the user the most control and choice, will be the most popular. Often the most successful new designs will be copied from market leaders like Apple and other Android makers.

Evolution is dirty, ugly, and messy, but the end result is always more successful in a competitive ecosystem. It's interesting to consider which strategy will be more robust in the smartphone market.