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

That's peachy

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately right now it appears that for users it's the other way around.

Re:That's peachy

[BitZtream]

That's not true. ONE reason for the iPhone's dominance is that there was no competition with a similar hardware class for quite some time.

Sounds to me like you didn't know smart phones existed before you saw the iPhone.

I assure you, I owned more powerful phones before hand, the only thing the iPhone has that its predecessor didn't is accelerometers and iPhone OS, my original iPhone was actually less powerful than the WinMo phone I owned before it.

Hardware wasn't the problem. The problem is that smartphones in general suck, the iPhone happens to suck a whole lot less.

No, don't tell me about what smart phone you have and how it doesn't suck. It does, you just don't realize it, they have a long way to go before the start getting to the non-suck state. We're about at the C64 stage right now. Which many look back on fondly and talk about how great they are ... from their modern, billion times faster PCs.

The problem is that people like you still have no clue why the iPhone is popular. Its not the hardware. Its not the OS. Its not the app store. Its not iTunes. Its the whole package. From start to finish its all fluid. If you say that about Android, the only response I can give you is to come back and talk to me after you've actually owned one.

People don't give a flying fuck about the processor it user, how much ram it has or who makes it. Really, they don't. They care about having a device thats enjoyable to use, across the board. As long as you keep trying to compare a product based only on specifications of the hardware or OS, you'll continue to be unable to understand why your predictions are invariably wrong. Regardless of where you want to believe it or not, style and user experience are actually what the people care about ... well, normal people anyway. It either does or doesn't meet their requirements, thats all they care about tech specs. A 400mhz proc is no different than a 200mhz proc if 200mhz plays their latest downloads of survivor.

The iPhone isn't going to put up a fight because the contenders still haven't figured out that we're boxing, not playing checkers. To put it bluntly, as far as the general public is concerned, the iPhones contenders simply aren't.

Re:Use "em" not "px" when defining the UI

[Anonymous Coward]

To those about to complain that screen resolution differences makes developing for android harder, then try using a UI measurement that does not rely on pixels, like em

Incidentally bitmaps that use em have not been invented yet. Vectors are not good for everything, and may take more power to render on the fly.

Also, em solves exactly nothing about how much content can you fit on a display before it becomes unreadable, a problem you may get if you treat DPI as a free variable. Oh and it also doesn't factor in display ratio, unless you think squashing things is the way to go.

No it will not

[LWATCDR]

"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.'""
No because if it has any type of UI odds are that uses swing or awt. Not only that but I doubt that the Android JVM has all the standard libraries that are available on Sun Java.
Yes they will know the syntax of the language but the libraries will be totally different.
Not to mention that is probably very little code running on servers that you will want to run on a phone.

And yes I write in java and I have an Android phone and I have looked at the Android SDK.

Are you kidding me???

[thetartanavenger]

The pure Java foundation of Android

Android is not java. Yes it has java aspects but it is not java! It's bits of java with a customized Android API.It doesn't even run a normal JVM, it runs the Dalvik VM.

Not only that, but all of the code from other Java programs will run on your Android phone

Seriously, no. Just... no. Try compiling a program that uses Swing, AWT or javax stuff.

Don't get me wrong, I really like Android and hate iPhones. I have a G1 (lacking on RAM as much as it is). I've programmed for android although for fun, not the marketplace. I've even made my own ROM, again for fun. But claiming Android is Java and that everything that Java can do Android can also do natively is just naive

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!"

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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.

Re:Use "em" not "px" when defining the UI

[Sancho]

His point is from a flawed premise. The Android emulator lets you target any version of Android with any version of the software. They could have spent 0 in purchase costs in order to effectively test on every conceivable hardware platform. They set unreasonable testing criteria, paid too much to fulfill it, and now they're complaining about it.