

Ask YC: What do you think is the future of Android? - vijayshankar

- Does Android have a future?
- How should phone manufacturers adopt or leverage it if they should (including apple)?
- Though there were free mobile platforms like Linux, they were not a threat to commercial platforms like Windows Mobile. This can be attributed to other problems with free Linux, like lack of support, cost of building Linux applications to the state suitable to finally put it in a phone and sell. Now Google seems to address these issues by bundling free applications with Android platform (both from Google and from worldwide developer community). Given these aspects, is Android going to give a tough competition to mobile platforms like Windows Mobile?
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hcho
From a European perspective, anyone in his right mind should wait till a major
handset manufacturer buys into them before starting to develop applications
for it.And I must tell big names are very wary of depending on another big
name for their products; hence Microsoft Mobile's miserable track record
across the pond.

~~~
davidw
<http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_members.html>

It's not Nokia, but it's not quite 'nobody' either.

~~~
hcho
Being in the alliance does not mean that they will do large volume phone
production with Android. Samsung and Motorola are always keen on being Linux
consortiums. What's their Linux phones' market share in Europe?

I am not saying that Google will never make it. It will take time before they
can grab a decent share. The name of the game is wait and see at the moment.

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nickb
Android has already been delayed and there's no news about when exactly are we
going to see handsets for it to come out. Also, we don't know yet who won all
those spectrum auctions.

If Google did win those auctions, then Android does have a future. If they
lost, I'm afraid that Android is probably not going to succeed.

Just look at how Sergey Brin is praising the iPhone and uses it all the
time... that should tell you that maybe you should hedge your bets and start
looking at the iPhone SDK as soon as it comes out instead of betting on
Android... at least iPhone is real.

~~~
davidw
Delayed? I'm developing for it right now with the publicly available SDK. Are
you referring to that TechCrunch article that got its facts wrong? The only
thing that's been pushed back is the contest deadline.

Apple has a history of creating great things that are never open enough to
grab a large share of the market. I'm sure the iPhone is cool and that with
the SDK you'll be able to do neat things, but in terms of widespread use....
I'll wait and see.

~~~
nickb
Enjoy: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/04/googles-android-is-
alre...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/04/googles-android-is-already-
delayed/)

~~~
davidw
That an update to the SDK/contest is a few weeks late is not the hand waving
that they originally came out with - they had their facts completely wrong, as
the 'update' stuff shows.

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davidw
I'm betting on it being at least somewhat successful, which is why I've been
spending a lot of time working on Hecl for it.

I've talked with various other people who seem enthusiastic, because it seems
to get a lot of things right: 1) open 2) backed by some muscle 3) reasonably
complete API.

My biggest worry is really always-on connections and web apps, which, although
they don't give you all the low-level access, are an order of magnitude easier
to develop and deploy.

~~~
bayareaguy
Hecl is cool. It's what Jacl should have been. Keep up the good work.

~~~
davidw
Thanks! They have different goals though... Jacl is an implementation of Tcl,
whereas Hecl is its own language, that borrows some things from Tcl, but tries
to improve on it: the core is smaller, we've abandoned the "everything is a
string" idea (note, however, that Tcl does not represent everything internally
as a string and hasn't for 10 years), and the commands are different.

Hecl is also very targeted at applications where its small size and
flexibility give it a bit of an advantage... There's no way I can compete with
JRuby or things like that on standard Java, given their popularity, so I
continue to target the mobile/embedded space, even though you certainly
_could_ use it as an embedded interpreter in all kinds of different Java apps.

~~~
bayareaguy
How do you think Hecl compares to Sun's own JavaFX Script / JavaFX Mobile?

~~~
davidw
Their language looks interesting, but it's fairly new. They certainly have a
lot more resources to throw at it than I do, but on the other hand:

\- Hecl is real, and runs on all kinds of existing mobile phones, even old
ones, and is deployed in existing products.

\- Hecl is not tied to Sun, so for instance the Android port has no political
implications. I'm doing it because Android looks like a decent bet.

The fact that they made a scripting language at all is proof that my basic
idea (scripting language for mobile phones) is on the right track.
Incidentally, YC also funded a company that made something similar:
<http://tsumobi.com/>

------
eusman
whatever prediction we make has more probability to cancel it self than
happening.

