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But Scoble, c'mon open your eyes for another app reality - tons of ideas and features are not possible on the iPhone but ONLY on Android. Uberpowerful keyboard managers that integrate custom layouts and OCR, copy/paste with cloud sync and multi-item clipboards, Locale event automation that integrates AI into your phone's activities, Contact lists that redefine social networking, Dialers with predictive search and automated service auto-calling, powerful camera apps that integrate real-time HDR into your photos and apps that immediately capture every new video or image done by any app and upload them to your desired social networks.
Scoble, when you claimed there were 85,000 reasons to stay entrenched in your iPhone fantasy land, you missed to mentioned the hundreds of apps that are impossible for iPhone (except jailbroken and heavily pumped with Cydia goodness) and you're totally missing out. As anyone who has delegated half of his manual activity with their smartphone to something like Locale, who share media real-time with PicPush, etc. I have discovered the true strength of Android and I think that investing in it even now when it is still young is a wise choice.
Why? I don't see much that iPhone or Android are impossible to do. It's only a matter of if those companies want to do it. Its like every few years people have to gather into cults, shout at each other "My dad is better than your". Certainly "best" means different things to different developers.
* My iPod has a dynamic lockscreen (app is LockInfo) showing the weather, RSS, calendar items and latest mail. Android has it and its called FlyScreen, too.
* My iPod has a Growl-like notification engine that shows latest email, calendar and alarm events etc. in any application. It's called GRiP.
* My iPod has a QTweeter app which opens from anywhere (home or application) and allows me to send a status to both Twitter and Facebook.
* My iPod has backgrounding through Backgrounder, and has easy to use task manager for switching between apps called Kurakae.
* My iPod has folders for apps. Android has 3rd party Launchers that add categories, folders, tagging and dynamic folders (smart folders based on tags) for apps.
* My iPod has SBSettings for changing device settings from within any app.
* My iPod changes its settings depending on the WiFi network it is connected. Android has Locale, a super-powerful automation app that can do anything depending on time, location and more.
Okay, BF, its your turn to prove to me that it's just up to developers to come up with these apps on iPhone. You cannot. It's not up to iPhone developers. It's up to Apple to release their iron grip on the device which they won't. Android simply allows creation of thremendous amount of apps and services that are not constrained by the narrow thinking enforced by Cupertino. You and everyone else who thinks iPhone is the Jesus phone simply are entrenched in narrow-minded thinking when it comes to applications - you just envision simple, one-app-at-a-time, no-inter-app-interoperability, no-backgrounding, no-anything-innovative sort of apps.
To really dispense with installed applications, Javascript is key. Whether the browser technology is Opera Mini or Webkit, the Javascript support and performance has to be good.
But to date by far iPhone remains the best for developers because they are the only one that provide a seamless billing system with a painless way to suck in revenues for developers. Blackberry has one advantage: they can price apps higher for the same usage (easy to compare). But the billing is more painful.
You mean like how Open Source is in all settop boxes, mail servers, appliances etc., so Microsoft and Apple can't compete against all those verticals?
I'm so tired of the "Open beats Closed, Every time" mantra. Let me guess, 2010, Year of the Linux Desktop, right?
Talk about your writing on the wall.
> 16-17,000 times a day on Blackberry.
> 8,000 times a day on Android.
Any dev who, upon seeing those data, doesn't immediately think, 'Holy crap - look at that _huge_ Android number, relative to the installed base!' should have his head examined.
I was thinking of writing an app for iPhone to enable customers to make and receive phone calls....what do you think? Could be huge, right?
Probably not. Phone calling has been seriously marginalized by texting, surfing, facebook, etc.
If you could pry the numbers from Nimbuzz or Fring that would be way more telling. Although I suspect Apple will still come out on top. Not necessarily because more people will use your app but iphone users have become used to "snacking" on apps. That is downloading them, trying them and discarding or not using them. Users of other phones tend to be more careful about their decisions especially if they have to pay.
There is, however a fairly big piece of the pie in Europe, where stats can be slightly different.
Thanks for the case study though. Wonder if US people really use RIM devices for business rather then vanity as they tend to do here.