We’ve heard countless hack analysts tell Nokia and BlackBerry that they should revive their fortunes by building an Android phone but we’ve never heard anyone give the same advice to Apple… until now. Wired reports that Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, who has a long history of trolling his former company by critiquing its latest products while praising its rivals’ offerings, thinks that Apple should seriously consider building an Android phone.
“There’s nothing to keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market,” Wozniak said. “We could compete very well. People like the precious looks of stylings and manufacturing that we do in our product compared to the other Android offerings. We could play in two arenas at the same time.”
Wozniak went on to explain that an Apple Android phone would supplement and not replace its standard iOS devices. He also that he would have liked to see what would have happened if BlackBerry had decided to build an Android phone but he said that by now it’s “probably too late” for such a device to help the company.
While we think Woz’s suggestion here is well-intentioned, it also would go against just about everything that Apple has worked to build over the past seven years. The point of the iPhone has been to deliver a tightly controlled user experience that runs entirely through Apple’s own software ecosystem. Giving up even a tiny slice of that control — and giving it over to a platform built by arch-rival Google, no less — would probably make Apple’s entire Cupertino campus melt down and crumble into ash.
