Android’s Advantage Over iPhone in Mobile Health Applications

The reports are all over the web comparing the Android market share to iPhone’s market share (see one example here). These numbers are important for anyone in the mobile health space that’s considering their strategy for developing a mobile health application. The same goes for EHR vendors that are working on their mobile EHR strategy.

The reality as I see the mobile phone market share numbers is that Android is taking the lead when it comes to market share. No doubt, iPhone still has an incredibly compelling offering and many loyal fans. This is particularly true in healthcare where a doctor having an iPhone is in many ways a bit of a cool “status” symbol for the doctor. However, in the long term I think that even healthcare will see a similar market share shift to the Android over the iPhone as well.

Why am I so bullish on the Android in healthcare despite healthcare’s current love affair with the iPhone?

The core reason that I think the Android phones (and much of this could apply to tablets as well) will do very well as mobile health applications is because of how much customization is possible with Android devices. In fact, pretty much anything is possible on an Android phone because of the open source nature of the software. I expect many mobile health applications will need and want to exploit the flexibility and openness of Android over the iPhone.

One concern I do have about this idea is that Android does pose its own challenges for developers. In the case of the iPhone, you basically only have to code your application to work across a small handful of iOS versions and handsets. In fact, Apple has smartly made sure that many things remained the same across every iPhone. This makes developers lives much easier. In the case of Android, you have hundreds of possible handset combinations you have to consider when developing your application. This can be really hard to test and can often lead to a bad user experience for some Android devices.

In some ways, the current Android environment reminds me of the challenges we use to face (and still do today in some ways) in creating a webpage that worked across all the various web browsers. A lot of effort went into making sure your website worked everywhere. However, over time the standards have developed and this is much less of an issue today than it was when the internet first started. I believe the same will be true for Android.

The reality is that Android and iPhones are both here to stay for the foreseeable future. Most mobile health applications are going to have to be able to support both platforms. Some might say that we should just be glad that it’s only two platforms we have to worry about. We had a lot more than two to think about back during the internet browser wars.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

6 Comments

  • Android fragmentation as an advantage? Not when there are so many devices, with varying screen sizes, RAM, CPU/GPU, yet limited developer resources. Heck, iOS devices come in only a handful of variants as is, many apps don’t support the iPhone 5’s extra vertical pixels and run in letterbox mode.

    Older Android devices get one update, maybe two before being left behind, with security issues left unpatched. Pie chart of Android versions: http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

  • Android fragmentation is a potential downside and challenge that I mention. The ability to customize Android is the advantage over the iPhone. Many medical apps will want a very high level of customization.

  • One great benefit with android I see is, you can get an Andriod device(I said device, not app :)) designed very specific to your healthcare practice. And then build custom apps over it. Might not be possible with Apple devices.

  • John – Thanks for the interesting article but from the perspective of a healthcare provider or an IT supplier in health, you have to develop for all of the major platforms. In the developed world, more than 50% of users have a smartphone already including Blackberry and Windows as well as Apple and Android; recent market reports anticipate Windows moving into third place during 2013/14, so any strategy has to address all four operating systems as well as being able to intelligently render to the screensize of the device.
    In terms of healthcare, the interesting development is the number of bluetooth enabled devices that patients can now use to monitor their own health, with the data being uploaded into an application, with the patient having the option to share with one or more clinicians.

  • Matthew,
    I agree with you if you’re creating a consumer health application. Although, if you have iPhone and Android and a decent HTML5 web application, that would probably be enough even for the consumer world. And to start you might focus on just iPhone or Android and then move to the other pretty quickly after.

    Although, when you’re talking about a specialized medical device I think you could make the case for going only Android. While Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a hot topic in healthcare, there could be a number of situations where the medical application was built right into the Android O/S and then you could just develop for Android.

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