Google, as the leading internet giant, has already taken a solid stand in the mobile application market with the release of the Android platform. Few years ago, the company was well known for its popular search engine, which managed to stand out and shine compared to other search engines such as altavista.com and yahoo.com. However, in recent years, the company has shown its dramatic effort in exploring other areas, not limiting itself only to search. To this end, the android platform has opened doors for developers to innovate without limits and interestingly enough, more innovative applications has already surfaced from diverse developer communities rather than google itself. This showed that the freedom and openness that Google has given to mobile application developers through the android platform, has truly brought a great benefit not only to the company but also to various developer communities who have been ambitious waiting for so long to develop ground breaking mobile applications with ease.
Except all these benefits that android brings, one might still ask a question of what potential does Android have in the mobile application market when compared to other platforms such as iPhone and Blackberry. Although recent reviews from different sources reports that Android is dramatically catching up with the iPhone market and moreover seems to have more potential compared to other mobile application platforms, however, it is not quite clear as to whether will Android stay long enough in the mobile app market. According to my perspective, Android has a great potential and these are things that I believe will make android win the game.
Openness – making the Android OS completely open, and also making the Android SDK freely available and accessible to everyone, has already invited countless innovations and will continue to invite more innovations. Innovation is what makes some products and services to last long than others. As the platform maintains its philosophy of being open, it will be the love of most development communities.
Flexible design methodologies – android adopted clean and simple design methodologies which make writing applications in android more of a fun than a pain in the ass. Moreover, the learning curve is shorter compared to other mobile platforms. As intuitive as it is to write applications in android, more developers will possibly find it more comfortable to stay with android than other platforms.
Unconstrained hardware access – Throughout all blog posts, social media sites, forums and developer communities I visited, the questions I came across where something like "how do I overlay so and so object on android camera, how do I use the Sensor API in android , etc. Developers are more interested in taking advantage of the underlying device hardware to develop unthinkable applications without any constraints and that is what Android offered, which led to rising number of innovative Augmented Reality applications and other cool apps created by diverse developer communities.
Increasing support for different devices – Apple took a path to have their mobile OS support only the iPhone, while Blackberry has their software only on a variety Blackberry devices but still the same brand. The android has gone to support multiple device brands which make it more sensible.
What do you think and What is your view on this ?
Nyc topic. I've been enticed by the hype of Android. I see alot of it in Linux magazines. I will read up on it and see how I can get involved.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion Android is BIG. It will grow and challenge Apple and most likely surpass BlackBerry OS in the smart phone arena in the next 2 years. Many researchers have predicted that Android will become the second largest smart phone platform in the next 2 to 4 years. You have already explained its advantages so I will not waste time going through them again. On top of that Android as a brand has a pull factor due to its association with high quality and trendy devices like HTCs and Google’s clever marketing around it.
ReplyDeleteHowever there is just one potential huddle in the way of Android i.e. the Oracle court action against Google's over the use of proprietary Java technologies in Android. Not only does it have the potential to taint Android's glowing reputation as an open platform but Java as a whole too. I just hope that Oracle will come back to its senses and drop this nonsense. Read about it here:
http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/13/technology/oracle_android/index.htm