> While I would agree that there are some unfortunate and limiting decisions > in the design of android (but maybe not agree with you about which those > are), I'm not sure that this actually matters that much in the long run.
I think you're getting the gist of it. It's always hard to tell how much impact these "limiting decisions" will have in the future (and there will always be differences of opinion about them), but certainly they're there. The analog is designing a CPU with a too-small addressing space -- you can invent fixes, and patches on the fixes, and kludges on the patches on the fixes for awhile, but sooner or later it catches up with you, and the platform gets more and more expensive to build and use along the way. Usually the platform will coast along under the momentum of existing apps and users for awhile, but sooner or later the costs make it more feasible (for both vendor and customer) to dump the old and switch rather than to keep going. Some vendors (not to be named) "finesse" this issue by forcing users to change platforms at regular intervals, others, thanks to good initial design (or sometimes just clever emulation), are able to advance their platforms while still maintaining compatibility with apps that are 30 years old. But I don't see the basis for either in Android. On May 25, 10:17 am, Chris Stratton <cs07...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tuesday, May 24, 2011 11:29:03 AM UTC-4, DanH wrote: > > Additionally, Android, as it's currently designed, does not have > > > "legs". The process model and UI are both too restrictive to be > > extendable to the pads and other new paradigms of the future. > > While I would agree that there are some unfortunate and limiting decisions > in the design of android (but maybe not agree with you about which those > are), I'm not sure that this actually matters that much in the long run. > > The thing that android has is momentum. If you look around, it's almost > like every company who wants to think they are in the consumer electronics > business is now offering, or working on offering, their own android device. > > And I think that's very important; the original IBM PC wasn't perfect > either, and some of its issues are with us today, but a large enough variety > of interests jumped on the bandwagon and adapted it to tolerably accomplish > the huge variety of things they needed. > > A possible relief-valve for what one person or another may see as a > limitation of android is that it's not necessarily clear what android has to > be in order to be android. A mobile phone operating system? Well, there > are now non-phones. A framework built on linux? I hear someone can run > apps on QNX and someone else hopes to on Windows. Linux with an apache > userspace? I expect someone has or is working on a GNU version. Dalvik? > Someone will run a more conventional java, and someone else will > re-implement the core APIs in C++. Software at all? People are putting > Ubuntu on devices sold for android. > > As more and more interests get involved, I expect we will see a someone > offering a contrasting alternative to every possibly controversial aspect of > "android", created so that some interest can leverage what they do like > about the platform (or the supply momentum behind it) while working around > the aspect that doesn't work for them. > > Chris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
