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Comment by rksprst | Hacker News Reader

I understand the point of rewarding developers... but I think they could have gotten more out if it if they had the exact same reqs but for the iphone... meaning they were recruiting successful iphone devs to develop for android by offering a free android phone.

I have an iphone and have some iphone apps in the app store. If I also had an android phone, I would make apps for android. I am sure a lot of developers feel similarly... this would have been a good way to increase the size/quality of their app store.

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Yes it would seem that a developer who had successfully developed an Android application wouldn't need a free phone...?

The other way 'round though (as the comment above describes) would be a killer strategy.

I think a lot of us are still on first generation Android devices. I use the emulator to make sure everything runs smoothly at higher resolutions and on newer releases of Android, but such details simply don't get as much attention since I don't interact with them day-to-day. I'm sure that when my Nexus or Droid comes, I'll focus more on those little details.

So this is a way of ensuring that the most popular apps work beautifully on the flagship phones, as well as creating some positive publicity and developer goodwill.

And of course, I'm delighted. I thought I had another 18 months to wait before I would get a better phone.

They gave away phones at the Android developer days. So it was to people already showing an interest in Android, and investing their time (half a day). Maybe just giving one to every iPhone developer would be too easy - they should at least show some investment into Android? Not every iPhone developer will become an Android developer, but I am sure nobody would mind getting a free phone.

This isn't an attempt to expand their influence, but a frantic effort to mitigate the serious fuckup they have done in mobile space up until the end of last year: Android platform fragmentation. Both hardware and OS versions are far too diverse to present a coherent development platform. This is the sink hole that swallowed J2ME, Palm, and almost ingested Windows Mobile. This is exactly where Apple took the opposite approach - one screen size, one input type, one memory size, one CPU, one OS version. They bumped up CPU and memory recently so that makes two platforms - a newish and and oldish one, as smooth a transition path as there could possibly be.

Google is now trying to take all successful apps and have them work well on one "golden standard" platform which is Android 2.0 and Nexus One/Droid. If they are to have any hope of avoiding the fate of J2ME they will have to herd a lot of cats - both developers and OEMs - towards something resembling an actual uniform platform.

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