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Android OS: A challenge for the apps developers
By siliconindia
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Monday, 12 October 2009, 20:00 IST
Bangalore: About 75 million phones running on the Android operating system will be sold in 2012 , the research firm Gartner has stated. And if the stated figures are right, Android will eventually become the second most popular system after Symbian, reports TechCrunch.
This might be possible, as the Operating System (OS) is free unlike Windows Mobile, and gives mobile carriers and handset manufacturers the ability to create a smartphone that someone may actually use.
Android, which is an open source OS, must avoid the fate of J2ME, an open source mobile applications platform. Open source is said to be great until everyone withdraws into their own world, as what happened to J2ME, and a number of frustrated Android developers are now saying that there is a risk Android following the same path.
A number of new Android devices are announced by companies such as HTC, Samsung, Dell, Verizon and some others will launch these phones shortly.
The Android application developers are extremely frustrated with the OS right now. For the iPhone, they build once and maintain the code base. On Android, they built once for version 1.5, but are getting less installs as compared to the iPhone.
Now they are facing a landslide of new handsets, as some are running version 1.6 and some others are running Android version 2.0. The manufacturers are speeding to release their phones by the 2009 holiday season, and want to ensure the hot applications to work on their phones.
The developers say that this is not just a matter of debugging their existing application to ensure that it works on the various handsets, they have to build and maintain separate code for various Android devices.
The developers are frustrated, and the consumers will be confused when their Android phone would not let them download their favorite third party applications.
If the applications are running bug free cross device without troubling the developers, Android may be looking good. But if developers are forced to create and maintain multiple versions of their applications for various devices, Android may be in trouble. The whole idea of Android is to let developers build once and let users install on any Android device, which is not certain to happen.
