
Neil McAllister
delves into the Android and iPhone SDKs to help sort out which will be the best bet for developers now that
technical details of the
first Android smartphone have been announced. Whereas the iPhone requires an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.5.4 or later, ADC membership, and familiarity with proprietary Mac OS X dev tools, the standard IDE for Android is Eclipse. And because most tasks can be performed with command-line tools, you can expect third parties to develop Android SDK plug-ins for other IDEs. 'By just about any measure, Google's Android is more open and developer-friendly than the iPhone,' McAllister writes. This openness is
essential to Android's prospects. 'Based on raw market share alone, the iPhone seems likely to remain the smartphone developer's platform of choice â" especially when ISVs can translate that market share into application sales,' McAllister writes. 'In this race, Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux.'
Member since:
2005-12-02
"You can chalk it up to opinion if you want, but I am an order of magnitude more productive on the iPhone than I am on Android, and I'm not the only one."
Okay, maybe I am just out of the loop. There are no Android phones out yet, the first one to be released at the end of October by T-Mobile, the G1. So how can you be more productive on something that does not exist yet? Serious question, as even on Android's web site it mentions there are no devices using it yet.