Even Woz Thinks the Android Bests the iPhone
Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak still loves his iPhone, but says in some ways, Android has leapt ahead. Wow. — Apple CEO Steve Jobs hated the Android smartphone operating system so much that he vowed he would spend his last dying breath …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is at least the third time Steve Wozniak has publicly warmed to a rival phone. In January 2010 he confessed to loving the Google phone (his 'Google Phone' confession), and in November 2010 he had to push back after being quoted saying apps ran better off the iPhone (the 'misquoted' walk-back), insisting almost every app he had was better on iOS. The new remarks land just months after Steve Jobs's death, with Jobs's vow to spend his 'last dying breath' destroying Android now part of the public record.
The timing gives the quote unusual weight: Wozniak is speaking as Apple's cofounder but not as an employee, so his candor reads as an internal dissent the company cannot discipline. It also lands alongside other dents in Apple's polish narrative from the same period, including professional editors drifting away from Final Cut Pro X after its overhaul.
First-order effects
- Apple gets a PR headache it cannot answer through channels: the man on the founding logo is conceding feature ground to Android, directly contradicting the Jobs-era line that Android was a stolen product to be destroyed.
- Android's camp gains its most quotable endorsement yet — a statement from inside Apple's own history that marketing teams and carrier partners can cite verbatim.
Second-order effects
- Every future Wozniak comment about phones now gets parsed like a product review, forcing Apple to compete for his narrative the way it competes for reviewers' — a dynamic already visible in the 2010 misquote episode.
- Rival platforms gain a template: courting respected, unaffiliated tech figures can yield credibility that paid advertising cannot buy, raising the value of candid voices across the smartphone wars.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, founder-voices become a standing counterweight to corporate messaging — companies lose control of their origin stories once founders speak freely, and rivals learn to amplify those voices rather than rebut them.
- The episode points toward a smartphone market judged on feature-by-feature comparisons rather than platform loyalty alone, with even Apple's own icons willing to concede individual rounds.
The trend: Wozniak's recurring public praise of rival phones is turning Apple's cofounder into a one-man dissent channel against the company's hard line on Android.