Where Android Beats the iPhone

snydeq writes "Peter Wayner provides a developer's comparison of Android and the iPhone and finds Android not only competitive but in fact a better choice than the iPhone for many developers, largely due to its Java foundation. 'While iPhone developers have found that one path to success is playing to our baser instincts (until Apple shuts them down), a number of Android applications are offering practical solutions that unlock the power of a phone that's really a Unix machine you can slip into your pocket,' Wayner writes, pointing out GScript and Remote DB as two powerful tools for developers to make rough but workable custom tools for Android. But the real gem is Java: 'The pure Java foundation of Android will be one of the biggest attractions for many businesses with Java programmers on the staff. Any Java developer familiar with Eclipse should be able to use Google's Android documentation to turn out a very basic application in just a few hours. Not only that, but all of the code from other Java programs will run on your Android phone — although it won't look pretty or run as fast as it does on multicore servers.'"

Comments

Re:It's biggest strength

[Xebikr]

Why was this modded down? Is it wrong? Apple has gone from evil yet innovative to just evil. Their recent lawsuits all but scream "We are out of ideas! Release the lawyers!"

Re:Windows Mobile

[Dan East]

My game engine, which has been used in a Top-100 iPhone game, is 99% C++, and only has the minimum amount of Objective-C code required to handle various system events (around 200 lines of code). Of course applications intimately integrating with the iPhone's GUI API would require much more Objective-C. So Objective C is not the only officially supported language for the iPhone for generating native binaries.