Apple's Gift To Google: Hungry Android Developers? (AAPL, GOOG)
Why's that? For its forthcoming apps platform, Apple is only distributing hand-picked apps, and only through one place -- the official iPhone apps store. Until now, dozens (hundreds?) of coders had been writing unofficial apps for iPhones that were hacked, or "jailbroken," to run third-party software without Apple's nod. But now that the official store is coming on July 11, the percentage of new iPhone owners who jailbreak their phones will probably plummet.
But we think there will still be some jailbreak iPhone app developers left whose apps don't confirm to Apple's requirements -- no running in the background, no Internet phone calls over AT&T's (T) 3G network, no copyright violations, etc. -- and will still want an outlet for their work.
So does Mac/iPhone developer Craig Hockenberry, who seems to have caught some of the discussion on our site or on John Gruber's Daring Fireball. Specifically, Hockenberry thinks they'll take their projects to Google's Android OS. He Twitters: "The market for jailbreak apps is ONLY in countries where there is no App Store. Hackers and non-mainstream apps will move over to Android…"
We think he could be right Why Android? Like Apple's OS X for the iPhone, it's a powerful mobile operating system designed for high-quality phones. But unlike Apple's phone, it's totally open -- developers can write whatever applications they want that do whatever they want, and install them on as many Android phones as they want without Google's blessing. We think this will be especially big with coders who write game system emulators, code interpreters (like Web browsers, an open-source Flash reader, etc.), background apps, and media players, which Apple might not allow onto the iPhone because they compete with iTunes.
If this happens, it's great news for Google, which needs as much buzz it can get from early adopter-types about Android's "install whatever the heck you want" feature. Especially this winter, when Android phone makers will be vying for the same gift buyers eyeing Apple's 3G iPhones.
What do you think? Is the Android defection likely? Or will iPhone coders, many of whom are Mac -- not mobile, -- coders, jump to the official iPhone platform and just ditch their jailbreak projects? Let us know in comments below.
See Also:
Will The iPhone's Apps Store Kill The 'Jailbreak' Market? Maybe Not
O'Reilly Bets On iPhone 'Hackers'
Five Great Apps For Hacked iPhones
Why Apple's iPhone Apps Platform Could Spark Huge iPhone Sales
One - SMART developers write programs to SELL them.
Two - there are ZERO consumers now for ANDROID.
Three - By year end, when ANDROID is expected, there will be an installed base of give or take, 15 million iPhone users, in 80+ countries.
Four - Smart developers want an EASY way to showcase their products to as many buying customers as possible. The Apple AppStore will INSTANTLY give them access to this base, with ZERO advertising costs, hosting costs, and keeping the customers upadted as the programs are improved. Cost is a one time fee of 30% of the initial selling price. Anyone that can support, host, and distribute programs for that price is a screaming bargain.
Five - CONFUSION. Look at WinDOZE, it has to work with everyone's differing ways of implementing things, and how well has that worked out recently?Incompatibilities glare, customers blaming the software, the software companies blaming the hardware, and everyone blaming the consumer!
Six - You develop for the ANDROID, great. At the end of the day, THAT is your entire market. Whereas with the Apple developers kit, when you have mastered it, you have basically written programs that are a short hop from being able to scale up to the Apple laptops and desktops, and THAT increases your potential marketplace by a factor of 20X.
Seven - How "cool" is Google, really? How many kids do you see beseiging the Google campus, standing in line all night to be part of the "Google Scene??" Never underestimate peer pressure, and for years now, the young have two categories of computer people, the "in's" with their Apple products, and the "droids" who are using anything else.
Sure, the porn industry, hackers, crackers, and weirdo's will adore a completely unfettered and open system, let them have it. But trust this, as soon as the WIFF of a successful program is developed for Android, TEN hungry apple programmers will knock it off, and have it ready, and be SELLING it in the apple ecosystem within a few days.
I wish Android well, I really do. Competition is great, it keeps everyone sharp. But in this ballgame, they are playing catchup with a second string team, in a stadium that is promised, but not even constructed yet.
i would like to add that this is likely to be as cool as Vista! (put some lipstick on that pig)
One - Really? Wow!
Two - Who cares? There will be surely much more for Android than for the iPhone.
Three - Basically you could be happy if there will be 10 Mio. and most of them will live in the US - have you ever checked the European selling figures? They are laughable - even LG sold more:http://www.trustedreviews.com/mobile-phones/news/2007/12/24/LG-Viewty-UK-Sales-Beating-iPhone/p1
Four - The blessings of the AppStore? You make me laugh. How old are you? 14? Otherwise I couldn't explain your nativity.
Five - Well I have seen so many people struggling with your so much praised, easy and consistent UI that I only see this as wishful thinking of an Apple fanboy.
Six - Android won't stop at the cell phone either and I always thought that Apple has got a market share around 5% of approx. 800 Mio. PCs, that makes only 40 Mio. for me, do you want to tell me that there only have been 2 Mio. iPhones sold?
Seven - Ok, you are 14.
"...they are playing catchup with a second string team..."
We'll come back to it when the first phones come out. Second string team - you make me laugh...
And I'm not talking about a copycat iphone either. If only they could come out with something more advanced than multi-touch and or display tech and install android on such a device......I would SOOOOOOO buy that!
Apple wants a stable, mass user-friendly platform for mobile, or OS X with a Windows-like market share. That requires lockdown of the OS and the apps that can officially run on an iPhone, hence AppStore.
Android values flexibility for their developers over stability of the OS - not that Android won't be stable, but it will be less of a known quantity for the end consumer. That nearly guarantees that Android will be a (fanatical) niche product.
There is definitely room for both philosophies in the mobile marketplace, just like on the desktop. But I'd expect iPhone/AppStore to be way more popular, just because the number of non-developers/hackers/crackers/weirdos is much greater, in any consumer market. Most people just want stuff that works.
There were 10 million sold as of last month.
EVERY overseas carrier is shocked at the predemand for the iPhone. Italy, 100k+, AU shut down preorders, UK overwhelmed.
I would not be at all surprised if the FIRST WEEK sales for the iPhone 3G were 5 million. Just filling up the pipeline to have enough on hand for the rollouts in 80 countries and territories now will almost get you there.
2. Are there features on an Android phone that are impossible to implement on an iPhone?
3. How much money are the Android vendors, t-mobile, sprint, going to spend against T and VZ?
4. Andoid vs Apple, which brand (if you call Android a brand) would you rather flash amongst your cool friends?
5. Isn't the openness/closeness of a technical platform just one among many other factors in the battle to win money from a consumer's wallet?
In the meantime, iPhone developers will be selling thousands (far from "hand-picked") of apps at an average of $10 a piece into a market of tens of millions of eager customers.
If I were going to sit down an start writing mobile software today, it's pretty obvious where my bet would go. We'll have to see if that changes toward the end of the year, but my guess is that Android won't even be a viable market until Christmas 2009, if then.
Wouanderfullll !
fIRST : It is stupid to say that a SMART developer write programs to SELL them.
dEUXIO : I would rather go with user friendly apps choosen by apple cause I know it will work right.
aND : On another point et view...
SINCE GOOGLE IS AN F_B_I / C_I_A INFORMANT :::
*I am wondering how much time all your personnal information will be transmitted through little OH SO petty androids.*
A N S W E R S all ???
I think even most iPhone/Mac fans would prefer that most phones from other phone manufacturers ran an open source OS sponsored by Google rather than one of the other major alternatives - Windows Mobile. If nothing else, it will fragment the opposition to the iPhone and stop Microsoft from achieving dominance in the mobile market.
OS X on the iPhone with 500MBs of BSD unix under the hood will also be in a much better place to benefit from developments in the Linux-based Android and vice versa due to their common unix heritage.
While the openness of Android is enticing it will be a double-edged sword. Without any editorial control like the Apple App Store, it will be trivially easy for malware apps to blossom on Android. Hopefully that won't be the case but a free-for-all has it's disadvantages.
-Mart
10 Million? Poor boy:
"As of June 9, the company had sold 6 million first-generation iPhones, according to Steve Jobs."
http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/06/19/iphone-suppliers-expect-to-ship-10-million-units-in-q3-alone/
"in 22 countries on July 11, "
You can basically forget the other 58 countries they will make up some hundred thousand at best and Europe is Nokia country 3G and GPS won't cut it there...
Preorders would only mean anything if these were new iPhone buyers and not only upgraders...
Paul
You see, it is easy to talk about android in a vacuum (no current carriers) but once someone actually tries to ship a phone the big question is will the carrier allow for it to be as open as Google would like? I can't imagine that Apple is unable to figure out how to allow the iPhone to be used as a modem an attached computer but yet they did not (the assumption is that AT&T didn't want it). I'm betting that the iPhone and the apple engineers are both capable of making an iChat client for iPhone that would work over the AT&T network but they are not supporting it.
There are already talks about an android delay because of issues with carriers. So we will just have to wait and see just how open Android is and how closed iPhone/iTunes is to know if there is much of a chance of defection.
IMHO
Dozens if not hundred of different hardware designs running bastardized versions of Android hacked by time rushed and under resourced phone designers... This has train wreck written all over it. Even if it does work, god help version one adopters.
By the time this actually runs right Apple will have 100 million phones, hundreds of brilliant apps, a mobile-me cloud infrastructure, synergistic hook ups with all kinds of hardware and software.
I saw the android demo, but, man... they have a long way to go to get the most basic shipping product out there, and without a bit of the ecosystem.
There's also quite a bit of "Apple might not" in your story. Has Apple confirmed that they won't allow another music management app on the iPhone? Or that they will ban an iPhone version of Firefox or Opera? I haven't heard that (outside of rampant speculation). Those apps don't seem to be obvious violators on Apple's Do Not Deploy list.
I can't see any reason for Apple to ban Firefox or some other music management software (you won't see Napster subs or anything like that, because you can't even use those Windows Media services on a Mac).
It seems to me that you're overstating the libertine freedom of Android, while at the same time making Apple's oversight of the AppStore out to be just a bit more nefarious than it may turn out to be. We'll know soon, I suppose.
But yes, regarding how tight Apple ends up with apps... in the absence of real information, we'll just have to see.
"fuming that the carriers they hoped to liberate are the ones slowing them down now."
Um, noo! The *carriers* whole business model of nickel and diming customers for every little thing is all about locking things down and only opening them one at a time for an additional monthly charge.
The carriers do not want the customers to be liberated to run whatever services on the dumb pipe.
http://gizmodo.com/5018800/wsj-android-is-a-giant-delayed-flustercuck-iphone-easier-to-develop-for
A key difference is in the choice of languages for the development platforms, Android using java makes it available to a large base of developers and allows the applications to take advantage of an extremely mature mobile development API. The IPhone requires a language that is far less popular among developers these days. Though the UI of the IPhone is impressive, UI elements can be easily mirrored in competing devices, already we are seeing the "IPhonization" of smart phones from other makers as they try to steal some of the IPhones , slide, pinch and tap screen thunder.
Ultimately, Apple would need to untie itself from AT&T but so much of the price of the devices is being subsidized that this would come at a severe loss of demand unless Apple eats lost subsidization from a dissolved exclusive AT&T carrier deal.
The long term outlook is simple if Apple stays its course, the Android phones will be released offering an ecosystem of applications similar to what we have on the pc to users, once Users get used to these applications the game is up. A platform will have been established , similar to how Microsoft ruled IBM hardware in the mid 80's that can not be shaken. Apple will ironically be relegated to precisely the same position in cell phones that it currently has in desktops. That of a well designed player with great applications on their platform, a small rabid base of users and only limited penetration into the market. Given the profit that Apple is making mining just this niche now it seems they could be happy with that growth for the next few years but they won't be establishing a dominant mobile device OS platform unless they completely open up access to their software and allow other manufacturers to license the hardware necessary to ensure compatibility across their unique (and likely patented) hardware features.
I think Android will be successful but for developers, the unknowns make it hard today to see how or how well they will profit.
/
I think the open development and distribution platform of the Android OS makes it a mini version of the windows hegemony in the making. On the pc, how do developers make money? Simple, they develop using freely available tools for the windows platform, they then market and sell their software to customers directly. The OS serves as the nearly ubiquitous marketplace that they can hawk their wares on to the expanding user community (which will span phone manufacturers and service providers eventually unlike the IPhone) so the answer is already present in the pc software space.
The key to this will be allowing Android phones the ability to have software uploaded to them very easily, many smart phones require customized software to have them talk to a pc, android should make this as easy as plugging in via a mini USB cable or better yet, allowing the devices to wirelessly join windows or other platform networks by IP address. The idea that will work IMO is to have the Android phones essentially be indistinguishable from a pc once connected, when that is reached they will be as easy to add software too. (that also means they'll be targets for malware as well if the implementations are weak but you take the good with the bad)
I think in the short term Apple is going to sit pretty, Android is developing slowly and needs to catch up. I don't see the analogy to Linux working here as the Android platform is being standardized in a way that Linux is not. It has a potential for a greater market, particularly in the license allergic Asian market but it is going to take a while for it to penetrate. It is a tortoise and the hare story and though the hare (Apple) is way ahead, the stamina of that tortoise will bring it up in time, I'd say 5 years before the Android phones as a group exceed the IPhone ecosystem assuming my prognostications come to pass.
Until Symbian provides a method for opening up development and its API so that a software provider can develop one app. and have it run on all Symbian phones...they are just waiting to become the next "Palm"...who now "enjoy" a significantly smaller market share than they did when they had a dominant position in the market.
Case in point:
"Various implementations of user interfaces on top of Symbian (most notable being UIQ and Nokia's own S60) are incompatible, which along with the requirement that applications running on mobile phones be signed [18] is hindering the potential for a truly widely accepted mobile application platform."
Taken from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone
I agree, there's room for both to succeed. I wonder about the mentality of those who think you must pick one side to root for and reduce everything to a pissing match.
And Dan, other than the fact that there are only so many hours in a day, why couldn't a developer write for both platforms? I don't think it's your intention, but you seem to be suggesting that it's and either/or proposition. Possibly I'm just misunderstanding you.
I was specifically referring to the apps/developers working on jailbreak stuff, some of which won't find a home on Apple's iPhone apps store.
Everyone here speaks as there are only iPhone and Android in the market. Just a reality check: there's NOTHING Android. Zero. Just a (lame) SDK where even Bluetooth support is lacking.
Apple has sold 7 million iPhones. Symbian OS-based devices are over 200 million in the market. Goddammit, Nokia sells 15 million S60s a quarter, and even LG outsells iPhone in Europe, as shown by the stats. For each "innovative" application on the iPhone there are 5 or 10 for S60 or UIQ.
@Gregor Samsa: get me a couple of tickets as well, I want to take some pictures of the savages before they get extinct.
". But unlike Apple's phone, it's totally open -- developers can write whatever applications they want that do whatever they want, and install them on as many Android phones as they want without Google's blessing."
How many phones exactly? :)
Also, don't count on that: Android is going to be fully customizable by the operators, and they will have their way of locking down the device, as pretty much every other platform.
GET YOUR DAMN FACTS RIGHT.
An "article" who doesn't even mention the vibrant RIM development community isn't an article, is a piece of (bad) fiction.
It's starting to bother me that I've seen 3 articles today on this blog, and they're all kissing android's ass
I guess it's very possible that this blog is biased towards google, given the owner's best interest to have people using android since I bet they'll be selling a lot of ads on the android platform once it's available.
iPhone is here, I wouldn't waste my time right now building anything for android when I have less than 20 days to be on the market for the hottest phone of the decade.
when android comes, we'll port, no big deal, no need to alienate yourself, the goal is to have your product in as many cellphones as possible,
in the end I just hope both iPhone and android come up with fully compliant web browsers, that way you don't need to worry about the stupid AppStore
Just think realistically dude, by the time the Android comes out, even you will have tried an iPhone in your hands, shitload of cool applications will be there to have iPhones interact with one another, maybe you and your pride won't let you buy one, but deep inside you, you'll envy everyone around you with an iPhone, it's just a cooler phone, it's not a matter of how many hackers can develop for it... if there aren't enough hackers, there sure will be plenty of entrepreneurs that will see the business opportunities and will make a software ecosystem happen for the iPhone.
Just imagine someone having $200 bucks, and having to make the decision between, weird new google phone that might do cool things, vs, cool looking GPS-3G-iPhone that all my friends have, that's been tested by millions, oh, and which I can use as an ipod...
cmon dude, get real. you'll be developing apps for smoke, as it is, the whole thing could go down in flames, iPhone is here already, and everybody wants it
Also, as a personal note
A year ago, when the iPhone came out, I made the decision between a Nokie N95 and the iPhone, as a rule of thumb I never buy Apple's first generation technology.
All year I kept cursing at my damn phone, specially when my friend would take out the iphone and browse wikipedia or his gmail in no time, the web experience for the n95 sucks. It doesn't matter if there's a 275million market out there, iPhone is a product that will be able to take out a big chunk of that, and with that price of $200, even more.
I just wonder if they'll be able to actually produce so many phones to overwhelm the market and have 30 to 50mm phones by the end of 2009 all over the place.
People in Europe and Latin america alread crave the iPhone, and people in those countries, they may not have what to eat, but they love having the latest phone to show off. iPhone is just that
You REALLY need to calm down...your vitriol lessens the serious with which to take your posts.
I'd counter your Symbian stance by stating the obvious that you're comparing a 10+ yr old phone OS to 2 OS's with less than a year's development (well, I guess the iPhone has been in development for 2+ years by Apple). To measure by quantity of phones in use is to miss the main issue. The real measure here is quality of the programs that are being developed by each OS; that I feel is what has so many interested in the Apple/Android solutions. They are opening so many new and advanced features unheard of in the phone industry...definitely unattainable with Symbian's APIs.
Unless it changes quite dramatically, I'd say Symbian to iPhone/Android to will be comparable to DOS to Windows 95 in less than 3 years. It will seem archaic the methods presently required to navigate and interface with features on most smartphones.
Just my .02¢
/
1) Android is open: if you are a DEVICE DEVELOPER, no caveats necessary. If you an APPLICATION DEVELOPER, then you have to include carriers into the equation when you think about reach, and carriers and open are typically mutually exclusive terms.
2) Is Android's first beachhead focus disrupters or incumbents? There is a scenario where Android's actual sweet spot are devices that run on top of Wi-fi nets and avoid the carrier complexities. Given that Google (understandably) seems to be delaying release to focus on needs of T-Mobile, reality is probably that their focus is on traditional mobile carriers, which brings back to the "open" issue.
3) If you are a hacker and content to limit your world to subset of devices that are hackable and carrier independent, 1) and 2) sort of don't matter to you.
For sure, Symbian is still a player, just not a very interesting one. If you look at the current levels of developer interest, it is all centred around the iPhone and Android.
Symbian is suffering not only from the fragmentation in incompatible implementations and carrier-specific extensions within UIQ and S90 but to a terribly rickety OS that Nokia has shown an increasing lack of fidelity towards (witness the Nokia 770 and N800 Internet Tablets running Linux not Symbian). The failure of the N-Gage platform has also not helped.
Symbian grew out of the old EPOC OS for the old Psion Pocket Organisers back in 1980 and is showing its age with very difficult development environments and byzantine and fragmented app delivery that is no comparison to the App Store. In comparison, both Android and the iPhone are based on unix (linux being a unix-clone of course) with all the rock-solid stability, developer familiarity and expandability inherent in that platform. Symbian (and Windows Mobile for that matter) is not scaling well into this brave new world of pocket computers powered by 600MHz mobile processors, 128MB of RAM and 16GB of disk.
Comparing seven million iPhones to 200 million Nokia phones is spurious. If you compare the iPhone with the correct market segment - smartphones - as opposed to the millions of cheap no-margin basic commodity phones Nokia churns out, you see that despite selling in only 1-3 countries thru only 1-3 carriers in the past 12 months, at terribly high purchase prices, the iPhone is already the number 2 smartphone in the USA after Blackberry and number 3 in the world after Nokia and Blackberry. The vast majority of analysts agree that all signs point to this accelerating with the imminent release of the cheaper, faster, more feature-packed iPhone 3G.
-Mart
from
http://code.google.com/android/what-is-android.html
"All applications are written using the Java programming language."
...
"capabilities are exposed to developers through the Android application framework"
That last sentence is saying "we control what developers can do".
Java applications are sand boxed apps. You don't have access to the "Real" machine. You work on a virtual machine. Google chose this approach for a reason. Control.
I like the fact that both the iphone and android are not fully open systems. Fully open systems can lead the malicious software.
I want my phone to work. I believe that both companys are open "enough" so there is going to be awesome software on all platforms.
But don't believe the bull that one platform is more open than the other. That is just ignorant.
What a troll of a "story". Why must being an Android developer and an iPhone developer be mutually exclusive? Yes, they are different languages and such, but c'mon....
I'd rather have my app in front of every single iPhone user on the planet (App Store) rather than go it alone in the wilderness seeking customers for a phone that doesn't even exist yet.
Troll, troll, troll.
It's 30% of every sale that goes to Apple, not a one time fee of 30% of the selling price.
There is no Android.
Open source software will have security problems. People will not download or buy software without third party certified that it was safe to buy or download. Trojan Horse is the most scary thing when you download something to your computer. That software will steal every thing you got in your computer from checking to saving or credit card etc.
yes, the android TAM will be highly fractured (because every single implementation will have to be certified & configured by each and every carrier) ...
yes, the android feature-set will be inherently underwhelming compared to an os/x based platform (though andy rubin is ex-apple, so dont count out google all together) ...
yes, yes, yes, android doesnt seem to have any premium upside (it is just a cheap platform to distribute google advertising), and yes it has all these shortcomings (and more) ...
but at least the challenge that google poses to apple on the mobile space come from a behemoth that competes honestly & fairly - which is welcome change from an era when apple's chief competitor was a cyber gangster!
yes, the android TAM will be highly fractured (because every single implementation will have to be certified & configured by each and every carrier) ...
yes, the android feature-set will be inherently underwhelming compared to an os/x based platform (though andy rubin is ex-apple, so dont count out google all together) ...
yes, yes, yes, android doesnt seem to have any premium upside (it is just a cheap platform to distribute google advertising), and yes it has all these shortcomings (and more) ...
but at least the challenge that google poses to apple on the mobile space come from a behemoth that competes honestly & fairly - which is welcome change from the desktop era when apple's chief competitor was a cyber gangster!
/real/ competition (from RIM & android & maybe symbian) can only be a good thing -- for customers, platform vendors, carriers, and isv/publishers alike!
the sooner that the deadwood -- palm (which as squandered its chances after apple first ceded the pda market to them by canceling the newton) and winmob/winCE (more in the long line of failures from redmond) -- can be removed from the landscape the more coherent will become the marketplace for OPEN competition.
- the webform doesnt close after posting
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/147521/symbian_shifts_mobile_world_to_open_source.html
@Daniel
I was developing WAP applications for PALM devices in 2000 since you asked. No need for the sophomoric comments.
It's a good thing the webform doesn't close after posting because the CAPTCHA response at SAI fails about 50% of the time in my experience.
:)
(Fingers crossed as I post this... nope, failed again... reposting.)
On points 1-5: Exactly!
On Tan's 6th point: The mobile platform works wonders for distribution and retention. The addressable market for mobile is well over 10x the desktop/notebook market.
On Tan's 7th point: I agree. What has Google really done to improve search? Toss a bone and you get 10 back with ad revenue to boot... Did you see the keynote? All advertising, lots of software, and no ad revenue. Google is not solving the problem--it is prolonging--and that's not cool. Open source is all around, so are the public. Are most people cool, now? Cool is an acceptable and understood ideal. Google is acceptable but rarely understood.
Google's stadium is planned to be below sea-level.
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