Once I submitted my app I kind of forgot about the ADC. Partially because of the amount of time between the deadline and final announcement, and partially because I was busy at work. While I was waiting I downloaded the iPhone SDK. I like learning about new platforms and I felt like I had a good handle on Android.
I was surprised to realize that the ADC announcement (May 5) was a couple days away and started to get excited again and think about what I was going to do next. As the 5th passed and the week wore on I got to thinking about Android and and the iPhone. Three things came to mind. First, the glacial pace of development of the Android platform compared to the rate the iPhone SDK was developing seemed to indicate that Android wasn't important to Google. You may wonder how I can say this when Google was giving away 5 million dollars. To us 5 million sounds like an enormous sum, but to Google it is almost nothing. If anything the ADC has turned into cheap advertising and has gotten more free and cheap application development for the platform, (including 1738 free applications, and 50 $25,000 applications), than any other advertising promotion could have. If anything the ADC has been a bargain. The second thing that occurred to me was that there were exactly zero shipping devices. I worked at SavaJe which made a Java based OS for mobile phones. (We had a full Java2 SE platform, including Swing, CORBA, RMI running on a phone. We even had a JavaSpace built into the OS as a messaging system. UI performance was not far off from desktop performance even though it was running on an ARM processor on a phone. At one point an early user of the OS had JBoss searving pages from an iPaq. Yes, the J2EE app server.) One of the hardest things we ran into at SavaJe was getting a hardware manufacturer to put our OS on their phone. The operators loved us and were falling over themselves to get the OS. One of the major European operators invested a good amount of money in the company based on what they saw and liked. We offered to do ALL the work to get the OS ported to the phone and we had no takers. We were an unknown in the business and no one would take a chance. Perhaps Google will have better luck. But unless they are willing to throw huge amounts of money at the hardware manufacturers, or make hardware themselves, they are in for an uphill battle with the OEMs. The third thing that came to mind had to do with my own project. I wrote an electronic book reader. The reader supported MobiPocket and unencrypted Kindle books as well as plain text, and html. It also supported the Open Document Architecture which is the basis for Adobe's Digtital Editions Librabry. It even had some basic support for reading OpenOffice word processing documents. I had the reader setup so you could download an electronic book from http://www.manybooks.net and read it right away. (A bug that would crash the browser prevented this from working in the submitted version. I figured that there would be another SDK release to fix this bug, but alas, it was not to be.) I had gotten a Kindle for Christmas, (I have the best wife ever), and I figured that Android could use a book reader. As I worked on it I got the idea of being able to connect to the Kindle store and allow people to buy Kindle books to read on their Android phone. My reader wasn't innovative, but an Android based Kindle was. I figured that getting into the top 50 would give me a bargaining chip with Amazon to get access to the Kindle store APIs and encrypted books. But as the week wore on I started to get paranoid and wondered if Amazon and/or Google had already had this idea and maybe I wouldn't win because they were already working on it. Having a Android based version of Kindle would mean people would only need to carry one device to get both phone and Kindle based services. And if Amazon was already working with Google on on accessing the Kindle store they could also add access to the Amazon MP3 store and Unboxed. This would give Android full access to anything you could get at the iTunes store as well one heck of a catalog of electronic books. All on one device. So now I'm thinking that perhaps Google and Amazon have cut the little guy out to bring all this to Android themselves. I'd be a bit sad about that because it is a Monster opportunity. But on the other hand it would be one heck of a device and I'd be first in line to get one. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Challenge" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-challenge?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
