AndroidGuys

Rich Miner, group manager for mobile platforms at Google, made some pretty strong remarks yesterday about both Android and Apple’s iPhone.  He believes that since the Open Handset Alliance has 4 hardware manufacturers on board they are poised to reach a far larger audience.  “Once you have devices out there from Motorola,HTC, Samsung, and so on, there’s a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone,” stated Miner. 

He also points out that even though Apple’s new software developer’s kit had 100,000 downloads in the first 4 days, the Android SDK has eclipsed 750,000 downloads already.  Personally, we don’t like the idea of bragging up downloads as a lot of them might be out of sure curiosity and not true developers looking to get it for creating an application.  Still though, we’re curious to see if iPhone gets the same attention from developers after 90 days.  3/4 million downloads for a device that hasn’t even come out is truly remarkable.  

Rich also talks about limitations on the Apple SDK and how development could be limited by restrictions within the kit.  We learned earlier this week that one of the things angering developers is the fact that 3rd party applications cannot run the background, eliminating the capability to multi-task with the new programs.  That means your Sudoku game will end if you have to take a call with no ability (yet) to resume after call.  Not that big of a deal you say?  Imagine the outrage when you have to log back in to your social networking program or AIM each time your phone rings!  Official Apple programs that come out of the box can run in the background, so why impose the restriction?

If you want to read the rest of the article, head over to InformationWeek.