- 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?
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.