Google Android - The Android Log

Like it or not, Google has achieved something that none of the established knitting circles has managed so far; it has created a single target platform for developers to aim for. One early view of how you can build Android applications [link] illustrates this.

But a unified standard does not necessarily play well with the established mobile Linux players. The LiPS Forum [link] , for example, says it “regards OHA as complementary” and acknowledges [link] that Android and the OHA have confirmed the popularity of Linux in mobile and embedded applications. LiPS also says that Android shares in its mission “to reduce fragmentation among Linux-based mobile platforms” - only with a different approach. While LiPS aims to unify the development of mobile Linux through open standards, it sees the Android and OHA team as working to the same end with shared code.

Having digested the landslide of comments on my previous Android post, I think some of you called it: While Android is not a direct threat to the iPhone, it is very much a threat to Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and Symbian. Palm and WM in particular have been languishing for years with successive releases that are barely even an evolution from the previous one. They were never designed to run on phones in the first place, and both carry a tremendous amount of baggage that will be hard to eliminate from both a technical and user satisfaction standpoint. Palm in particular is so busy chasing their own tail that someone should probably call them and tell them about Android, because they might not have heard.

Really, all Android has to be is “good enough” in order to potentially snatch a good chunk of the low-to-mid range smartphone market. This is the point at which my previous missive devolved into an only borderline-related rant about my dissatisfaction with organizations who set “good enough” as a goal — and really how hard does it seem like it should be for Google to outdo Palm, for example. So, after some deep breaths and zen-like introspection, I’m officially upgrading to “wait and see” mode on Android, software-wise.

But now here’s where the whole 34 company committee thing still bothers me: Google wants Android to run on a lot of different hardware, and quite a few hardware vendors have signed on. That’s great, right? Well, it’s sort of great. Commoditizing the hardware will keep the price of Android phones down, which is certainly desirable. But I fear they’re going to run into the same quagmire that Windows Mobile has.

You don’t know if any given Windows Mobile device is going to have a touchscreen, a QWERTY keyboard, a numeric pad, WiFi, cellular access, Bluetooth, GPS… How can you design software that’s in any way elegant for an unknown combination of hardware? How well would the iPhone work if you couldn’t assume a touchscreen?