It's absolutely retarded to spend that kind of money developing on a platform controlled by such a capricious and arbitrary master as Apple. As soon as Android has a userbase, you'll never hear this sort of story again.
Time will tell. I'm pretty sure it will though. iPhone is 1 device on 1 network, Android will be dozens of devices across almost all networks. It's Mac vs. Windows all over again.
Actually even there, Microsoft's claims for Win Mo devices shipped this year is >14 million. If that's true it's nudging out iPhone or at least real damn close.
The iPhone is also locked to one carrier in the following countries: UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Japan, Venezuela and many more. Unlocked iPhones are offered in relatively few countries.
I was in the T-mobile store yesterday and the salesman advised me not to buy a G1 until (list of problems) were resolved with a new version of the software. Right now there's the G1 on T-mobile, Storm on Vodafone and iPhone on O2. iPhone is the clear leader and I can't see that changing anytime soon.
JavaME is dozens of devices across almost all networks, and that never meant success for the platform (if compared to the 1 device 1 network that apple introduced)...
You're wrong. Android is already dead. When people talk about 'when' with a product for more than a year, the product is dead. And Google actually got a phone released with Android - what happened? Basically, they killed the excitement in their platform. The phone looked terrible.
The REAL death knoll was when I heard that all phones are not required to have all features. So if you develop a game, do you or do not use the camera feature when all the phones may not have a camera? Do you or do you not use the accelerometer?
Google may have made a good product technically, but they made mistakes, and because of those mistakes, Android is dead.
Android will become the OS of choice form phone manufacturers in Guangzhou because it's free. But the big companies will not jump on the bandwagon for quite a while. They already have their existing OSes, and the customers don't care about Android.
Are you shitting me? I told my brother in law who drives trucks for a living (very non-geeky) about Android and 48 hours later he had hacked his HT Touch from Sprint to run a dev version of Android. He hates the baked in OS and absolutely loves Google's OS even with massive bugs (due to the hack) I told him in a year he's see dozens of phones with Android pre installed and he's already looking to ditch his months-old phone because of it.
That's not evidence, it's just a story. I could offer a better OS than most phones, and a good percentage of people would switch. What the people like is not 'android', it's multitouch, organisation and so on. If people really jump on the UI bandwagon, whoever wrote the OS in the phone will make their own OS look that way too. What does Android offer then?
Maybe I'm wrong - we'll see in a couple of years. But looking at things from the perspective of now, Google has bungled this big time. OS Platforms are a market with a lot of money behind it, and the mobile OS market has people with money that can rival googles and a lot more experience.
Google can win if the people want Android. And right now, the people don't care.
I can match your anecdote with one of my own - a geeky friend of mine wanted to get a new phone. He liked Android, since it would be like the iPhone but more open. He waited, and then that fugly phone came out. And a few weeks later, Nokia came up with a phone with just as nice an interface, but with well designed hardware. He went with Nokia.
That phone has gotten pretty good reviews. It's also the first effort from a small company. Large ones like Motorola begin enthusiastically shipping their first models very soon.
your 'very non-geeky' brother managed to hack a smartphone and uses a dev version of Android?
Ask him to send in his resume... we're hiring truck-driving hackers in here!
You're also wrong, how do you know what deals are coming out of big name mobile chip manufacturers like Motorola? Motorola is betting big on Android and they're releasing 20-30 devices based on Android, and most of them are not cell phones. This is according to a friend working there.
Windows was not a closed environment like the app store. I was comparing the comment to how the developer community during the launch of Windows saying Unix would win in the long run.
They said Windows was too restrictive and your letting a for-profit business control the platform is too risky, so users would naturally move to the open platform. But the average, mainstream user, was content with Windows because they were satisfied as long they had their Lotus 1-2-3 or Excel.
okay, how about netscape. microsoft went to them in the early days of the web, and said, effectively: "you can't sell netscape navigator on windows. you can put your browsers on all the other platforms, but windows is for us. otherwise, we'll crush you." everybody knows what happened after that.
EDIT: This is the first social bookmarking site where I feel like I should have the ability to link the same comment as a reply to multiple messages. I don't even remember wishing for this back in my USENET days. How can the userbase of this site be so clever and intelligent, but yet seem so redundant in the posted responses?
