Fake Steve Jobs illustrated the biggest Android problem: When your operating system is designed to be modified for each individual phone, and each phone runs a modified version of the system, then you can't reliably develop for it in the way you can for the iPhone.

If I make an iPhone app, then it'll work for every person with an iPhone and every person with an iPod touch. The same's not true for Android, which is why developers are reporting failures with the applications they're designing for it.

I've never used Android, unfortunately—can't find people with the phone to irritate/mug—but I'd imagine it's good, and I like that Google's released an OS with some focus on being good, because cell phone companies showed in the last decade that they don't give a damn about good when left to their own devices. Where I don't have faith in it, though, is in its attempt to make a developer haven that the iPhone doesn't offer. It seems that there're integral problems to its developer experience that won't fix themselves easily.

It's a problem, but I don't think it's an impossible one, and nor do I think the answer is that everyone everywhere should have the exact same phone. The Android guys, who are not stupid, certainly have J2ME to look at as an example of what could go wrong. And, to tell the truth, even J2ME is certainly painful once you try and taret a wide number of devices, but not impossible.

Yeah, until the next tech refresh for the iPhone. So then you have iPod Touch 1st and 2nd gen, iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G and 3GS. Bear in mind the 3GS has a more advanced graphics card, and then you need to bear in mind some of these have compass, camera, GPS, etc. That's not a small target by any means.

I seriously wonder what will happen when Apple upgrades the screen resolution to 800x400 or attempts to fit in new functionality such as multitasking without altering the current applications' VMs.

I can run any application on my 1st gen touch. Some things run a bit more slowly for me, but they work. Most things work perfectly. Games sometimes exceed me, but they still look perfect on the screen.

Apple's not stupid. If they up the screen resolution, and I'm not so sure they will any time soon, they'll do it in a way that maintains aspect ratio and offer a way for older apps to adjust. As things stand right now, the resolution is brilliant. Not much reason yet to up it any further.

the point here is that the iPhone is a lot less 'fragmentable' than Android since it's controlled by one single manufacturer. Sure, it will eventually change features so much that apps made for the latest hardware will no longer work on previous ones - but it will probably be a lot easier to manage than having a thousand different versions of the hardware, all being released at once...

Plus, AAPL's "throw away and buy the shiny new one" ethos has kept the majority of users constantly updating their already new ipod/iphone/mac for quite some time, so this fragmentation might as well be yet another strong point on their evil marketing plot. "1st gen iphone? Sheesh, that's too old, go get a new one"

Is that really the ethos you see Apple emanating? Because I've always seen the opposite. One of the things that I thought coolest about Apple back when I was on Windows were the people who talked about installing Leopard on a Powerbook and having it still work perfectly. Ditto the iPhone now. In fact, the line I hear directly from Apple is "Because we have no physical controls, we're allowed to keep our 1st gen iPhones in line with our freshest models, so the iPhone will outlast many of the other phones its age." Certainly my iPod is showing no strain in its second year. I haven't even upgraded to 3.0 and it still feels great.

On the other hand, it shouldn't be too hard really. People have been developing desktop apps for myriad resolutions for years.

Yes, but we're talking very small screens here, with very little room for design. When you can design any application to run at 800x600, then maybe you don't fill every screen but you have enough space to do what you want. When you're dealing with very small screens, some of which are multitouch and some of which aren't, some of which have physical keyboards and some of which don't, then you have to juggle a lot of variables and the quality of your design suffers.

I shouldn't have to point out the level of build in the iPhone apps gallery. Those applications are gorgeous. Better than most PC apps, I'd argue, in their compactness and elegance. Developers have an edge on the iPhone because there's an established design standard, and there's an established screen size. So they can spend as long as they need fiddling to make their app perfect within those confines. On Android, that's not possible.

To use an unnecessary metaphor, iPhone apps are haiku and Android apps are open verse. On the one hand, it's nice not to have limits, but on the other, you find it's much easier to make something beautiful when you're given set restraints with which to riff on.

The point is not to try and out-Apple Apple - iPhone will probably always be prettier. The point is to be 'good enough' while offering the flexibility, variety and freedom that Apple don't give you.

I guess that's what makes it hard for me to comment on this. I don't really care much for flexibility or variety or freedom. I want something to work as well as it possibly can, and don't worry about tweaking it unless the tweaks make it run better. So Android doesn't interest me at all.

> unless the tweaks make it run better

In a sense all software usage is just a series of tweaks. Otherwise you'd just have a big button to push and it would 'do stuff'. If that 'stuff' just happened to be exactly what you wanted then that would be fantastic. But that isn't reality. Reality is sometimes messy and complex so sometimes you need the ability to tweak things deal with the messy and complex problems from the real world.

Which is why I love my Mac so much. Most of what I need it does without my worrying about. At the same time, I can rip it up and change anything I'd like to if I want, and there are communities to help me get it changed. When I do need a tweak, it rarely takes me long at all.

Oh god. You aren't a real person are you? You're an Apple promo bot.

> I don't really care much for flexibility or variety or freedom

Phones definitely fall into the sphere of things I like to hack on. That's definitely the crux of the difference of opinions. I would agree with you when talking about, say, cars, but a computing device that I physically own is something I want access to.

and that (along with slightly minor platform differences) has hurt JavaME so much it's never grew to its full potential... (if it ever had any)

>I've never used Android, unfortunately—can't find people with the phone to irritate/mug

unalone, will you be at Startup School this Saturday? If so, you're welcome to borrow my Android Dev Phone for the day to play around with. I rotate between that phone, an iPhone, and a Nokia E75 depending on what I'm working on.

(back on topic) Considering the amount of attention that jwz gets, someone on the Android team should send him a free phone to tinker with asap.

(Completely off topic) Dystopia, huh? That's what I named my tank back when I was in the army. See you at startup school.

That's a good name for a tank! "The imperfect future is coming right at you!" :-p

Ah, people just thought I was weird. But they thought that anyway.

Besides, in D companies, all tank names have to start with D. People being who they are, 95% were named "Death .*" I thought "a place of utter misery and wretchedness" would be pretty accurate for just about anybody participating in a battle, regardless of side. I never got any closer than training, and even that sucked quite badly.

I would have loved to attend, but I'm on the East Coast.

There are some huge holes in the Android APIs that make writing well-produced games extremely challenging. The Audio APIs are particularly shitty, making it basically impossible to have worthwhile soundfx. I just looked and it's now finally possible to read incoming Audio without waiting for the user to finish recording! (though they still don't call it streaming)

That you're stuck in their unjustifiably-oddball bytecode-interpreter sandbox (no JIT!) makes it particularly hard to just implement things yourself in 'userspace'.

People have been saying "there will be a glut of Android phones out in a few months" for well over a year. This is the first Android hardware that isn't obviously a pile of shit -- it's actually better than the iPhone in many ways! Now we get to see if the software can live up to it.

> That you're stuck in their unjustifiably-oddball bytecode-interpreter sandbox (no JIT!)

It's pretty evident if you think about it: they wanted something open source under a liberal license (Apache/BSD rather than GPL), and so did not want to touch Sun's Java implementation. Therefore, they did their own thing, which is a much solution than hassling with Sun about licensing. I suspect we'll see performance improvements with time; it's not as if Google doesn't have the resources to create a JIT if/when they want.

For low-level performance-critical stuff you can always go down to C++, though I believe that's limited to operations on your own internal data and does not extend to system-level programming.