OSNews

Engadget's recent piece, "Mobile OS shootout", provides a relatively thorough comparison of current smartphone platforms and what they have going for them, mostly from a consumer gadget hound's point of view. They provide a bunch of nice comparative tables, among them the table "Third Party Development". From this table we learn that each platform has its own SDK, whereby some of the apps available are considered "native" - a distinction most non-developers won't be able to grok, since it depends on an understanding of runtime environments, etc. It's hard to say exactly who this table is targeting, actually; the developer or the end-user that the rest of the article seems to target. Let's just investigate some of the assumptions it makes.