Slashdot Mirror
SDK Shoot Out, Android Vs. IPhone
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister delves into the Android and iPhone SDKs to help sort out which will be the best bet for developers now that technical details of the first Android smartphone have been announced. Whereas the iPhone requires an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.5.4 or later, ADC membership, and familiarity with proprietary Mac OS X dev tools, the standard IDE for Android is Eclipse. And because most tasks can be performed with command-line tools, you can expert third parties to develop Android SDK plug-ins for other IDEs. Objective-C, used almost nowhere outside Apple, is required for iPhone UI development, while app-level Android programming is done in Java. 'By just about any measure, Google's Android is more open and developer-friendly than the iPhone,' McAllister writes, noting Apple's gag order restrictions on documentation, proprietary software requirements to view training videos, and right to reject your finished app from the sole distribution channel for iPhone. This openness is, of course, essential to Android's prospects. 'Based on raw market share alone, the iPhone seems likely to remain the smartphone developer's platform of choice — especially when ISVs can translate that market share into application sales,' McAllister writes. 'Sound familiar? In this race, Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux.'"
Android runs on Linux....
So I can run any CPU from any vendor, with any OS, and no familiarity with anything, to develop for Android? Cool!
No need for a message when the subject line says it all.
We buy MACs as conversation starters, PCs because we are depressed and dont like ourselves, and are gluttons for punishment.
Which of these phones is going to make me more attractive? Which phone will increase the size of my- er, um, bank account?
I dont just want a fuckin phone, I want a phone to provide solutions to Global Warming, AIDS and Fat People. THAT is the phone I want, dammit!
In this race, Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux.
It's more like Apple is taking a page from Apple's book and Google looks suspiciously like Microsoft.
For all their faults, Microsoft have always been more developer friendly than Apple.
I actually RTFA because I clicked on it before there were comments, got to the end and went looking for the next page link - but there isn't one. It's pretty light on any interesting technical details - mentions some stuff about the IDE, the frameworks ("one is Java and the other is Objective-C") and ends with the same question everyone else is asking, at the moment - which will be better.
If you've payed any attention at all to both Android and iPhone development already there's probably not much in there you won't have picked up from casually reading bits and pieces. Unfortunately. Let me know when there's a nice in-depth article available!
requires a intel mac?
dont tell that to my G5... it's happily working.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux."
No, Apple looks pretty much like Apple, and Android looks as much like Microsoft as it does Linux.
No standard headphone jack = no sale for this consumer. Looking forward to future android offerings though.
We have seen it for thousands of generations, the oppressed/rebel kid/cool dude becomes the oppressor. Apple is the new Microsoft. Pretty soon Google will be the new Microsoft, who knows what next.
What I do know is eventually it'll lead to by the law of natural selection the most oppressive organisation in the form of Skynet and mankind's only hope will be an Austrian Terminator (no no Summer Glau of Sarah Connor Chronicles is NOT a fighter type more like a japanese maid robot)
p.s. we do have to melt the terminator in the end just to be on the safe side
And before you can view the training videos, you must first download them (for free) from the iTunes Store. Windows users, that means you'll need to install QuickTime and iTunes --
Oh, you mean I HAVE to install iTunes to watch the training videos? Bummer.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The iPhone is primarily an awesome hand-held phone, GPS, PDA, etc. Pre-loaded 1st-party apps are what make the device sing. The ability to get 3rd-party apps is a secondary benefit. Most people buying this device are using it for what it comes with. This will be the case more and more as the device becomes more mainstream.
I hope that Android phones don't focus on the development aspects first, and the 1st-party applications second. If the device has all the same nice features of an iPhone + is better to develop for, then great. But if it does not have the ease-of-use and functionality of an iPhone right off the bat, then it won't succeed.
It would be nice to see comparisons of the market leaders with development for iPhone / Android.
Based on raw market share, Symbian is the market leader (57%), followed by Blackberry (17%), Windows Mobile (12%), Linux (7%) and then iPhone (2.8%). Android yet to make a showing!
( Figures from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone )
I've done Symbian developement and there are lots of ways of doing it. Nokia's C/C++ API, Java or even Python. It isn't 100% open as in you can't have the source code of the OS, but the APIs are all documented and there aren't any restrictions on what your apps can do. If you want your apps signed it can be harder I'm told, but I've never tried that.
Every man for himself, all in favour say "I"
As a fan of OS X, and Apple in general, I think they are trying to see how far they can push their control over the matter.
On the subject of their NDA, I'm not an insider, but it seems stupid, unnecessary, and harmful to me.
Android may be more open, but that does not always mean it's better. A few things are for certain:
- no one is comparing Android to Blackberry. It seems that the iPhone has become the de-facto one to kill.
- it will sure be interesting to see the battle between iPhone's closed development model on a hot device, and Android's open development on so-so devices.
They may just both win on their own merits.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I appreciate Android's open platform. I also appreciate Google's effort.
However, I have my qualms. It is not possible to write native application in C/C++. Everything has to go through the virtual machine. I haven't developed for Android except write a simple Hello World. But, I would like to write my own native application that run on the Linux kernel.
I do not like the iPhone, I hate Apple's brick walls around their platform which is anti to what Apple once stood for. 3rd party apps has made Symbian/WM the most popular mobile platforms and you cannot expect a long term growth with such iron fist.
I don't see how Android can be fairly compared with the iPhone given that the iPhone is already into it's second iteration and Android has just been released.
Everything else aside, I think the competition is great. I do give credit to Apple for helping to invigorate this market. Well, RIM and Palm probably deserve a lot of the credit, but Apple really gave this market a swift kick in the pants.
Who says it doesn't end up as native code? Java has had JIT compilers for years now. They even only compile the code to native once, too.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
You must be joking. Comparing Javascript to Java in terms of 'nativity' or saying that C++ and Objective-C are 'slightly different' in 'trivial ways' betrays your lack of IT experience right off the bat, sorry ;-)
It's true that neither Java nor Javascript are 'native' compiled code in the traditional sense, but it's still not a fair comparison. Javascript's runtime environment is the browser which is (by design) very limited in the amount of access it can have to the underlying system, hardware, etc. Java's runtime environment, the JVM, on the other hand, can be arbitrarily privleged, and depending on how the OS is laid out, can do just about anything any native app can do (at a perhaps minor performance penalty). Seeing as they plan to have Android running on a bunch of different phones, the choice of Java is pretty much a 'must' if they want to have any sort of ubiquity as a 'platform'.
Also, Objective-C and C++ are quite, quite different. It would be easier to list their similarities than their differences -- they both have the basic goal of providing object-oriented facilities to C. That's about where the similarities end; C++ goes the route we've all come to know and love (hate), while Objective-C goes for a more pure "Smalltalk"-style message-passing paradigm. The similarities between the approaches are cosmetic -- the kinds of problems you run into in these two languages are quite different.
Besides, the main difficulty in writing apps for the iPhone is learning Cocoa, not Objective-C. Most programmers can pick up new languages (even fairly unique ones) in a matter of days or weeks (at least to a passable level of competence), but a giant framework like Cocoa is hugely intimidating and often changing and much harder to find resources for.
Jython: "A compiler to compile Python source code down to Java bytecode which can run directly on a JVM".
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
It's really weird to read that "Based on raw market share alone, the iPhone seems likely to remain the smartphone developer's platform of choice"... Don't tell me that the iPhone already outselled every single Windows-based PDA/Smartphone sold in the last 10-or-so years...
Now, I see the Android as a much serious threat to Microsoft in the smartphone playground than the iPhone. If the Android devices are polished and slick enough, the public might catch on them, and with the openness regarding the development process, the comunity would surely correct the eventual rough edges. That's simply not the case with the iPhone: why can't I use another email client on the iPhone? Oh, right, it "competes" with the native aplication...
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
iPhone SDK requirements to develop an iPhone app:
OS X 10.5.3 or later (Intel or G5)
ADC membership (free but requires registration)
XCode (free bundled with OS X Tiger and above but not installed)
Objective-C language
To distribute iPhone app:
Yearly License: Individual $99 or Enterprise $299
Android:
Windows XP or Vista, OS X Tiger or higher, or Linux (tested on Ubuntu Dapper Drake)
Eclipse 3.3 or 3.4 (free download from eclipse.org)
Java JDK 1.5 or 1.6 (free from Sun)
Apache Ant 1.65 (Linux/OS X), 1.7 (Windows) (free from apache.org)
Good chart at engadget.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
User interests beat developer interests, assuming that the first doesn't utterly cripple the second. And it does have to utterly cripple them to cause a problem.
* Every Wikipedia story, Slashdot commenters bitch about their experiences of participation. However, the site's still #7 in the world, so what's it doing right? Focusing on the reader.
* GPL (a user-rights license) vs BSD. Compare the popularity of Linux versus FreeBSD.
* iPhone vs Android. The best mobile phone interface ever. In this case, Apple is going further than anyone before in trying to utterly cripple developer interest - but if you can work an SDK then that many users is going to be attractive.
Openness will get Android a fabulous ticky-box feature list ... but, y'know, Windows Mobile has a fabulous ticky-box feature list, and no-one picks that instead of an iPhone if they have a choice.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
A story mentioning Google without a "donoevil" tag?? Someone must be falling asleep at the switch.
In all seriousness, does the average consumer care about the underlying stuff? The "problem" with iPhone apps is that they look good, they're easy to install and they generally work. That's all the average person cares about. More and more people have iPods and thus iTunes and so are used to having the process of transfering Item A (music) to Item B (their iPod.) Now swap music for application and iPod for iPhone and you've got a something people are familiar with. Granted, that _might_ change if Google does create their own version of the Google store, but it depends how they pimp it. My guess is appropriate apps will show up in search results, the same way as their ads are tied to whatever it is for which you are searching. Now that might tip things toward them. Everybody uses "The Google" and they're all familiar with it....
Bark less. Wag more.
Sure, Android is more developer-friendly than the iPhone. Has Apple ever pretended otherwise?
Apple goes for something entirely different - being customer-friendly. Apple demands high-quality apps, and rejects substandard ones. Apple requires well-engineered user interfaces. Apple restricts the number of functionally equivalent apps and ways of doing something, to follow the well-known interface guideline of not overwhelming a user with choice.
I can already see how Google's Android is going to end up. Want a sneak peek? Go look at SourceForge today. Maybe 10% of the projects are extremely useful high-quality projects supported by a vibrant community. 90% of the projects are abandoned crap - but they're developer-friendly! You can get the source and fix it!
Being developer-friendly helps by making it easier to create software. That's a double-edged sword, however, because as much as developer-friendliness makes it easier to create good software, it also makes it two or three times easier to create crap software. Witness the plethora of Google apps that have never left beta, witness the gross proliferation of spyware and script-kiddie viruses, witness the rampant proliferation of me-too Linux distributions used by two people and their dog.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar. This is very simple - when I want something fun to play with, when I want to indulge my hobbyist sweet-tooth, I go to the Bazaar. When there's something I need to depend on and I don't have the time to tweak it myself, I go to the Cathedral. Now, in all seriousness, do you see a cell phone more as a fun toy or a necessary, must-work piece of your life? I imagine a lot of Slashdot readers want the cell phone to be a toy, but I also imagine most people in this world would prefer something to Always Just Work, even if it's less fun. It's the difference between driving a fun but high-maintenance sports car on the weekends and driving a reliable commuter car to work every day; everybody wants a sports car, but most people pick the commuter car.
Which means I don't buy the hype around Android. It's a fantastically wonderful toy, but Google's track record is that they do not have the discipline to enforce usability at the expense of their fun toys. And, to my great sorrow, that is Google's great weakness.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
Most of the article compares subjective/non-concrete things such as how many people use Obj-C and how many use Java. It misses on one significant aspect of the choice of language. Java opens up numerous possibilities for Android. In my opinion that was an obviously good move from google. Here is why -
1) Safety - Java provides a lot wider safety net than native language can ever.
2) Control - you can enforce the signing requirements in the VM for all code that is run or you can limit it as a requirement to only certain potentially unsafe APIs (RIM does this - you don't need to sign an App with RIM provided keys unless you use the more dangerous APIs.) This arrangement can generally give the user a lot more flexibility and control over what can and cannot run on the phone.
3) Exceptions are non fatal and possible recoverable, memory leaks are harder to induce
4) Verification of software is easier - API usage, control over how much memory is used, what network connections are made etc.
Before people complain Java is ugly and slow - this is J2ME (Java Micro Edition) that we are talking about which is much more lean and has different UI (Android UI doesn't look anything like the ugly Desktop Java and neither does RIMs - both use J2ME) These factors obviously matter a lot in a Cell phone type environment. I am especially happier with my Blackberry that it allows me to control what a Application can do or cannot do - make Wifi connection - No, access my address book - hell no, Access location - yes, Access Device Settings - no etc.
Not true... It can be made to work on PPC macs with a few minor tweaks and the assistance of Pacifist. What you can't do is sign apps so that they can be run on an external device(the app signer isn't a universal binary). I use the sdk at home on my PPC powerbook, and check the code into my subversion repository, then when on an intel based Mac, sign the apps and test on the iPhone. Not ideal, but its better than nothing.
most of us geeks have made a choice for the next 3 years.
Speak for yourself. Being a geek and hating to be told how to use my gadgets are exactly the reasons I wouldn't touch an Iphone with a 10-foot pole.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux
Um, in America at least, Linux-based and/or Java-using phones (like Motorola's and the Sidekick, respectively) are some of the most locked-down phones you can buy, requiring certs and signed apps for everything. The last time I checked, anyone with a copy of Visual Studio can build apps for WM6 and deploy them to their phone, their friends' phones, or post them online for anyone else to download and install.
When it comes to real-world PDA phones, HTC's phones running Windows Mobile have been more open than even PALM's phones were. Anyone remember the Samsung SPHi300, i330, and i500 -- all of which were eagerly bought up when introduced, then withered on the vine because Samsung wouldn't release useful SDKs for them -- not even for innocent things like the screen/soft graffiti API, let alone anything related to the phone UI? Compare that to, say, the HTC Apache/PPC-6700, which was probably the most sliced, diced, hacked, and extended phone in history... a phone that was dysfunctional and almost unusable as a phone "out of the box", but had most of its worst problems ultimately solved by independent programmers who wrote their own extensions and enhancements for it.
The battle isn't "Android vs Windows Mobile and iPhone", it's "Android AND Windows Mobile vs iPhone". Windows Mobile devices might be some of the most dysfunctional phones on earth for making voice calls(*), but they ARE an open platform as far as app and extension development is concerned.
(*)I'd like to kill the IDIOT(s) who decided that an incoming call on a Touch whose display is "off" should enable touchscreen input... and leave it enabled... so if you don't hear an incoming call and have the phone in your pocket, you can trigger all kinds of random events without even realizing it. Or "ignore" an incoming call by accidentally touching the wrong place on the screen while trying to fish the ringing phone out of your pocket. Or notify me that I have voicemail, but require me to dismiss the notification to see the notification that I missed a call, then keep dismissing notifications to actually SEE whose call it was that I missed.... (bangs head on wall, fantasizing occasionally about banging the phone instead).
And to say ObjC is as easy as Ruby or Python is ludicrous.
It's easier than both of those....... IF you're grounded in C.
Reply to That ||
> Either the machine is open, or it isn't. If it's not, then Google has been deceiving us.
Google has been deceiving you. YOu have also been deceiving yourself. It depends on what your definition of Open is and who you are talking too. Google was talking to handset makers and carriers and Android is indeed Open to them. They were NOT talking to you, the end user. Android is 100% closed to you. It will be SIM locked. Apps will be signed and T-Mobile and perhaps Google will have an absolute veto that isn't subject to appeal over any apps loaded into the device. Any such apps will, at any rate, be sandboxed into the JAVA tarpit where performance isn't an option.
The only question is whether they can lock a phone better than Apple?
Democrat delenda est
What about Qt? Qt is about the same age and maturity as Linux, with Qtopia having been out there for far longer than iPhone, Android, or OpenMoko. As of August 2006, "there are more than four million Qtopia-based mobile phones in the market including mobile phones from Motorola, ZTE and Cellon" (from the press release announcing the Greenphone).
Qt is old as dirt by today's standards, being one of the most stable and robust frameworks out there, including its embedded platform (which implements its own windowing system to compete with X11 or Windows). The main "problem" with it is that it was never pimped out like Sun's Java was, so nobody has ever heard of it.
OpenMoko, written with Linux, GNU, and GTK+ on X11, has its telephony portions mostly written from scratch. It's so horribly immature that the Qtopia telephony software has been back-ported to Qt/X11 and now ships standard on OpenMoko devices. Truly a testament to Qt's robustness.
With Qt 4.4, Trolltech (now Nokia) put Apple's WebKit into the Qt framework (directly!), so making a webkit-based browser in Qt is a pretty trivial pursuit, as is rendering HTML and JavaScript in any standard app. Nobody seems to realize that this puts Qt/Embedded that much further ahead. Prepare to be stunned as Qt/Embedded quickly dominates the arena that everybody currently assumes is in contention between Google Android and Apple iPhone.
Oh, and Qt/Embedded is GPL'd software. Everything is open, your privacy can be assured, and YOU have control of your own phone. The way it should be. Just try and get that from Google or Apple. Hah!
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
There is no excuse however for Java's longer method names.
ProTip: Nobody types those method names out anymore. Enter the mid-90s and get an IDE with autocomplete.
Yes, vi and EMACS are awesome monuments to 1970s technology, and I also love them. But I'd no more use them for professional coding than I would wear a 1970s polyester leisure suit to a funeral. The tools have moved on, and so should you. I use IntelliJ's IDEA, but Eclipse is an acceptable second best, and it's free.
Well, I'm playing with my Freerunner right now. :)
SDK comparison wise there's no competition. The openmoko is basically a linux machine with a touchscreen and a GSM chip. Anything you can do with a Linux machine you can do with the Moko, Qt, gtk, shells, perl, python, etc. If you lack it you can port it. Forget special-purpose limited devices, this is the real deal, a full general purpose computer.
However, if you compare them as phones... well, the openmoko is basically a linux machine with a touchscreen and a GSM chip. After you've figured out how to flash it and decided on what distribution to run you get to debug alsa routing to bluetooth headset connections, configure gps daemons, etc. It's a good thing that it's as networked as it is (you can network over gsm, wlan, bluetooth, and what I use mostly, ethernet over USB (you'll want it in an USB port so it's charged anyway)) because you want a computer with multiple ssh sessions connected for many of the things you'll be doing on it.
Personally I'm not the least interested in getting either an Android based phone or the iPhone (or any other locked down proprietary crap), and for me the Freerunner is among the coolest things I've ever played with (and the first phone I've ever wanted to spend a cent of my own money on). The potential is enormous, and the way the base can make it into ubiquitous devices of all kinds makes me think it can become something that influences the future in a serious way. But it's not an end-user product yet, and I think it'll take a while before it's there.
What strikes me, is the similarity to the Matrix argument. What use is a developer friendly SDK, if you are prevented from running the code on the device you're writing for ?
Sure, $99 (+ Mac) doesn't sound much, but the issue is not money, it's access to the networking api for the apps you want to create. I don't care how fucking bling and shiny the SDK is if I can only write hello world (locally) using it.
Your post makes no sense. I can't tell if you are complaining about what you can do with the simulator (free version) or the abilities you have with the $99 program.
With the free SDK you can develop all day long against all the API's - the only thing the simulator will not give you is accelerometer data, or a good idea of how your app might perform on the phone.
With the $99 program you can deploy anything you like to your own phone. You never even have to submit to the app store, just keep running your own stuff or other code you download.
Yet again, form over function for apple.
Yet again, posting before understanding from an Apple Hater. What a shock.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley