Still reeling from the awesome Android announcement today. If you haven’t tried it yet, download the SDK and play with the cell phone emulator. Fire up Eclipse and create a new cell phone app. Rest assured; it all works on Linux/Win/OSX.
What I’m reeling from is just how much of a game-changer, or rather game-ender, this platform is. For instance, all of these platforms will from now on constantly be plagued with the question of “Why not use Android?”
- JavaFX
- FlashLite
QNX(okay, I was admittedly a little over eager regarding this one.)- WindowsMobile
- Symbian
- BlackBerry
- Qtopia
- OpenMoko
- Sugar
- Maemo
- iPhone
All of these are either restrictively closed platforms, use unfriendly low-level languages, don’t scale to support 3D or iPhone-quality animations, don’t have useful widget reuse, don’t allow replacing core components, etc etc.
I assume that Google will soon provide some easy AdWord embedding API to further stimulate application development.
Or perhaps they’ll keep it classy by tying applications implicitly to Ad revenues. So for instance when your Android app embeds the built in Map component, and a user happens to use that map (and GPS) to find a nearby sausage stand, a cut of the sausage stand’s Ad payments goes to the application’s author.
This is the true underlying beauty of Android, and the reason it can be completely free, open, and heavily developer-focused: No one can monetize a mobile platform’s application developers like Google and their AdEmpire can.
(Or possibly Facebook, given another year or so.)
I predict Android will massively change the face of every day technologies for years to come.
UPDATE: See Stefano’s excellent analysis of how big this announcement really is.
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You assume quite a bit; Google has plenty of clout, but it may or may not extend to the exceptionally closed mobile device market. Current network providers already have a business model, and this doesn’t serve that model unless it allows locking down features and content for ransom. Existing attempts to fight that will eventually succeed, but I don’t believe Android will change that overnight.
As for your implications that other platforms should defer to Android, I don’t think all the platforms on your list have one of the problems on your list. In particular, neither Sugar nor OpenMoko has any of the problems you list. They both have open platforms; they both support or will support high-level languages, they both will scale to support 3D/iPhone/etc interfaces (OpenMoko’s primary target will have 3D hardware), they both do widget reuse, and they both support some degree of mix-n-match components (I don’t know enough about Sugar to know how much it supports that, but I know OpenMoko does).
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Also, what you can download today is not open source, but has a rather restrictive license. Evidently this is supposed to change eventually, but use caution.
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@Anonymous: It’s a fair point about OpenMoko & Sugar. Sugar is Python, and resource usage is coming back to bite big time. OpenMoko is C. So in theory an app could run on OpenMoko using Python or Java, but jeez, that’s a lot of work. Maybe it makes sense if you need to call into a big native library. But barring that, what do these platforms buy you over Android at the end of the day?
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Firstly, @Anonymous – on what planet are smartphones “exceptionally closed”? You can run your blackberry/treo/windows/symbian phone on any network with any applications.
@orph, A friend who has been working on Android since right after the Google acquisition explained that basically Google makes money when people use the web, and the mobile web experience sucked so they decided that if they could make it better they’d make more money. I think they’ll be happy with ads on web pages.
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Firstly, @Anonymous – on what planet are smartphones “exceptionally closedâ€? You can run your blackberry/treo/windows/symbian phone on any network with any applications.
Yes, but on Verizon for instance, the “GPS” on phones is disabled unless you pay the fee for VZ Navigator, which doesn’t work on all phones, even ones with GPS on other networks (BlackBerry 8830 for instance). On my phone (the “chocolate”), the web browsers home page is locked to verizon’s crappy WEP page unless you hack it by using BitPim to copy a file off of the phone, hex edit it, and send it back. This is what Anonymous was saying. These are just a few examples, and it fits into their model of locking everything down and charging you for things the phone can already do. Not to mention the fact that it’s next impossible to put apps on my phone, because it’s got BREW on it.
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Not only OpenMoko, but to probably to a even higher degree Qtopia is
neither a restrictively closed platforms, nor uses an unfriendly low-level language (as C++/moc/Qt is not that low-level as C anymore), it does scale to support 3D and it is possible to do iPhone-quality animations, it has a useful widget reuse and it allows replacing core components (it’s nearly as easy as with Android), etc etc..So I see the potential in Android but that’s mainly due to the fact, that Google is behind it. Given the fact they throw out 10 million bucks for attracting developers beats alot of “competitors”….
For now it is just a hype with 10 million dollar “community” (*) backing. We have to wait until they really release the source-code for the core components – if they will do this will throw another light on the whole project….
(*) With that financial incentive there will be *only* closed source competition as any open source project would imply might loosing the chance to get 250k dollar – atleast until the final winner is determined.
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@Ian: Nice. But I doubt all the platform building happened just to facilitate more of the same kind of browsing. WebKit seems to be the least interesting/new part of this platform so far.
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@Gurkola: C++ is low-level meaning apps require a recompile for every phone platform. But ya, I totally agree that Android is big mostly because of Google’s backing.
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@Orph: The custom virtual machine in Android means that “apps required a recompile for Android versus other platforms”. It’s not Java you know. It’s yet another Intermediate Language. Which happens to have an IKVM-like precompiler to take Java bytecode and spit out Dalvik bytecode.
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How can you even begin to compare Android to QNX?
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@Anonymous, sugar is not resource constrained for using python. All the time critical apps are native C/C++. As far as I’m aware Android does not have a number of “killer features” required by sugar. eg a pervasive collaborative framework or a high performance rich text widget.
Android doesn’t need them but they’re critical for sugar’s intended application.
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I don’t see android killing off QNX any time soon, I mean QNX isn’t generally used for such frivolous things as mobile phones, it is used in things like real time flight control systems for aircraft. I think that is somewhat outside of the scope of android.
In reality I don’t see android killing off any platforms, but it will hopefully be a royal kick up the arse for any current developers of mobile software and that is never a good thing.
Motivation through competition rather than destruction through monopolisation.
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I agree. I think that also many services more or less only Google provides help to make the new devices really powerful. So a lot more like just extended mobil phones. And I really dont see anything that comes near to it. The iPhone in relations is rather a gimmick.
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Wow, you actually liked that API?
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Another great aspect of Android, when compared to Maemo or iPhone for instance, is the target platform. Maemo is limited to Nokia’s tablet, and obviously, Apple’s SDK (when released) will only target the iPhone. The Android/Open Handset Alliance so far includes LG, Motorola and Samsung. But with the availability of a free software stack like this, running on commodity components, it’s not hard to imagine that this might sprout a number of smaller manufacturers for whom the threshold has been significantly lowered.
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