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Comment by PieSquared | Hacker News Reader

Well, what's a better platform, then?

I develop for the iPhone because in some ways, it's a "sure" way to make money. Not necessarily a lot of money, but still. Other than Android, which has its own problems, what other platforms exist that give as wide an audience willing to spend money on your apps?

It's all cheery and nice to say "Apple sucks, hahah iPhone developers", but what's are other options for those of us who cannot work at a normal job and do not have the resources, time, or dedication to invest our lives in a startup?

(Serious question, by the way, not just bashing your comment here.)

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I think the subtext there is that he was saying that Android is the direction developers should lean towards. The mobile applications market is very squarely coming down to Apple versus Android. There are other big players in the mobile devices space, but not really in the mobile applications space, or at least not to the degree that Apple and Android are. Apple is where the money is today, but there are lots of folks that feel that those winds are changing - that Apple is starting to really start to make developers discontent enough to abandon their platform, while Android is finally starting to catch up to the point that it can compete as a first-class citizen.

They still have alot to catch up with. Start with allowing developers from more countries to put up paid apps on Market.

Something silly like 90+% of the money is STILL being spent on Apple Appstore purchases.

Google isn't doing their store well enough. They're only letting 13 countries buy and 9 countries sell. This is a huge problem.

The next 10 years are likely about who leaves fewer hideous mistakes in their implementation, and BOTH types of phones have them currently in their ecosystems

I'd say Apple is the much better bet for 3 years still.

I'm not sure about that; as long as Apple's policies are so capricious, few who aren't big enough to cut a private deal are going to invest immense resources in an iOS only project. Therefore there are going to be huge classes of applications that will have few if any first class, iOS only implementations.

Heck, you can't even do iPad development for your own business unless you've got over 500 employees and something I've not heard in detail WRT D&B.

You can still do internal dev, but it's a hell of a lot less convenient. You buy multiple 99 dollar dev licenses and do adhoc builds, and have to provide new provisioning profiles every 3 months.

Not perfect, but still possible.

Android, per se, doesn't exist. 3 Android platforms do, 1.5, 1.6 and 2.x. The issue with android even in the companies that have working stores and payment systems, is horrible horrible fragmentation. Hopefully they do something to fix this, but it honestly feels like the Android team at google is all engineers and no businesspeople negotiating a solution to this HUGE problem for that "platform" which is really 3 platforms.

It is like if windows had 30% on windows 3.1, 30% on windows 98 and 35% on windows XP SP2 and the other 5 percent on all sorts of things currently. There is that big of a gulf between the different OS versions when trying to program for it (which I do).

I want android to succeed. It's just not here yet.

I guess my point here is that the things that I cited will very possibly give Android time to succeed. It might not generally succeed, e.g. Apple may be able to carve out a long term and large niche of the market, but it seems to me that they're near totally excluding themselves from many important ones.

E.g. a lot of people talk about the using the iPad in health care. That strikes me as a non-starter unless Apple is able to change that market ... which they just might be able to do by directly working with a few 3rd parties. But not as the market stands today.

There's a very good chance you're right in your near term 3 year prediction ... but I could see things swinging faster, although not much faster. 2 years at minimum.

I think things will go one way or the other with this: The Apple "You can't innovate on the small scale" bias caused by their dev license policies might actually help fight medical record fragmentation. I can see a couple "trusted clients" talking to a few "standard EMR formats" on standard compliant servers finally taking hold if the device captivates doctors.

Additionally, the iPad works just fine with web software that doesn't use onmouseover. Lots of hospitals have much of their software on internal websites.

Then again, medical software always has been ultrafragmented, and perhaps it will stay that way, in which case android will likely be the implementation platform (or jailbroken iPads)

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