Now before I start on the iPhone comparison I'm going to pre-empt the normal "But Android is open source....." response by saying lets be honest and admit it as it stands Android is not an open source project because the public "open source" repository is pretty worthless in its' current state.
The last time I tried to build the master branch it failed missing some Google internal API classes. The SDKs I've produce from the cupcake branch seem to be considered by Google employees as pretty useless with comments like "This is why we want to be clear it is "unofficial," because it is not actually a working SDK" being thrown around and networking in the emulator still being broken a week after users started reporting the showstopper problem (And Romain did hint that Google have a fix, I read http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/msg/41fcefc36bd16d44 as "there is a version where this is fixed"). And as we all know you can't use it to build the exact versions of the open source parts of either of the two firmware versions that have shipped on the G1. To me it seems little more than code dump which is aimed at ensuring Google can keep saying "But it is open source and not just a Google project" Now, in the last week I had few conversations with iPhone developers so I could compare the Android developer experience to that of what is perceived as our nearest competitor and they are laughing at us (seriously, when I mentioned the G1 most of them responded by initially chuckling). The general consensus among them was; - Yes, you pay $99 for the iPhone dev kit, but you get "free" external testing (i.e. at apple) and commercial quality support with many queries being turned around in hours or a couple of days at worst. Compare that to some of the support queries on b.android.com for basic problems things like a Android failing to connect to wireless lans with hidden SSID (http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1041) which, after *five and a half months* is still marked as "New" and doesn't have a single response from a Google employee. - The most common cause of App Store listing rejections are things that users would complain about anyway. This includes things like performance characteristics, UI anomalies, and inconsistent behaviour. This is the type of stuff that is left for users to find out on Android and only comes to light when 1* or 2* comments are posted and even then you don't know if it's a one off on the users device or possibly something specific to their region (http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2372). - The normal amount of time from submission to app store listing is around 7 days. Some apps take months to go through the approval process, but that is because of intellectual property concerns, concerns over offensive content, or is because the app has to be re-reviewed a few times to meet the apples performance and behaviour guidelines. Yes it's not as fast as Android, but you know that once it's on the market it's of a quality where you're not going to get bombarded with user queries about problems straight off. - Most of the developers actually feel valued by Apple and feel that Apple does what it can to make sure they get the tools they need to do their job and ensure they're apps. This has been re-enforced by allowing the developers to beta test the new firmware and develop against it. Personally, it's made me shell out $99 for an iPhone SDK, dust off my Nokia N81, and spend $75 on eBay on a Blackberry so I can explore the alternatives. Al. --- * Written an Android App? - List it at http://andappstore.com/ * ====== Funky Android Limited is registered in England & Wales with the company number 6741909. The registered head office is Kemp House, 152-160 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, UK. The views expressed in this email are those of the author and not necessarily those of Funky Android Limited, it's associates, or it's subsidiaries. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
