Can we stop the Android/iOS fan war, please?

I don’t often go out of my way to link to stuff I write elsewhere  – but this once, I’m going to.

I’ve done a piece for the NEXT Berlin blog on why I think the iOS versus Android fanboy wars are deeply unhelpful, and obscuring the debates we need to be having around the way handheld computing is changing the way we live.

It appears to be something that’s beginning to bubble up in the collective tech blogging conciousness. Marco Armet explores the anti-Apple anger evident in some of the debate, in a piece for his new publication The Magazine. And Brian Hall pkes at some of the stupidity of the coverage in a blog post from earllier today. But both of these carry a pro-Apple, anti-Android slant, and I’m not really very interested in taking sides.

I think Jeff Eaton summed it up nicely when he kindly retweeded the link earlier:

Wise words from @adders on the dangers of mobile ecosystem tribalism: “team spirit” is for product teams, not users. nextberlin.eu/2012/11/can-we…
— Jeff Eaton (@eaton) November 23, 2012

I’ll leave it up to you to decide if my words are wise, but I think there’s a palpable difference between being a reasoned advocate of a product and a blind fanatic, loyal to his or her product tribe. And I object to the latter group polluting a discussion they are not capable of engaging with.