Getting Into Android – Finally
Posted on | March 17, 2010 | No Comments
I stumbled across some news that made my mostly overcast/cloudy afternoon an absolute delight. Tim Bray has joined Google as the resident android pundit. The gloves come off, immediately out of the gate, quoting his blog:
The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger. I hate it.
The decision to sit down and actually learn a mobile SDK for the purposes of (eventually) making some money in the process was one that I did not take lightly. I was excited about the iPhone until I saw the NDA required to even study how to write applications. The idea of an AppStore seemed great until Apple got involved. The market seemed lucrative, but I just had a bad feeling about hopping on that train.
Android needed a front. It needed someone who is actually willing to write code in order to honestly advocate the platform. It needed someone who could explain in less than a normal paragraph what some hour long speeches try to convey: Apple just doesn’t get it. Google did.
I had already decided that I wasn’t going near an iPhone. I don’t need to reiterate lots of sensational press, what remained consistent was that Apple was extremely inconsistent and just too flaky to deal with. I kept thinking about Android, but I held off. I wanted to see that Google was really serious about pushing it before investing time and money into getting proficient. This was enough of a nudge to convince me that its not going to be a waste of time.
Only one problem remains. If I even so much as LOOK at my wife’s HTC Hero with a USB cable in my hand, daggers come flying through the air and ninjas start coming through the windows.
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