Comment by arnorhs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arnorhs | Hacker News Reader

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I found very few factual things in that article. He's trying to make a point that android devices are worse or the only feature they have is that you're not forced to use Verizon. (where he's obviously forgetting that there's a universe outside of the US)

There are a dozen or more elements that are better about the iPhone. Everything from the big: the App Store versus the Android Market (from the consumer perspective) — to the little: the multi-touch and overall touchscreen responsiveness.

I would think Multi-touch/touch responsiveness has more to do with the devices and not the operating system.

I myself believe that Android will become the dominant OS on phones, because they've got developers on their side. All my hacker friends and developers are really excited to start hacking on android phones (as am I) and not so interested in developing for iPhone. I believe the biggest reason there are a lot of developers (more so companies) that flocked to iOS development is because of the marketplace, the opportunities it brought and that there wasn't any similar device available at that time.

A marketplace for apps will in the end become decentralized and the greatest apps will be for android because the smartest people will want to develop for it. History repeats itself.

There's more hacker affection for Linux than Windows, but somehow the year of Linux on the desktop was always right around the corner. Palm also had a devoted developer following, but it couldn't make up for mistakes at the mothership. In short history may repeat itself, but not the way you hope.

Yet most of the software development done nowadays is web, and guess which is the favorite target for web deployments?

Linux is coming of age in a post-desktop world, so the question is almost irrelevant. What IS relevant is that the biggest web technologies being used right now, as well as the technologies that will some day become dominant (Ruby, Scala, Haskell, Node.js, and others) are primarily for Linux and by Linux devs.

But as far as smartphones go, the question is still open, the market is still up for grabs, so developer-friendliness is going to be a top priority. Right now iPhone may be the top platform, but I would not underestimate Google's ability to appeal to developers (neither Apple's ability to make successive, giant leaps).

Most of the technologies you have enumerated only have mind-share on places like Reddit & HN. The exception is Ruby, which is still a drop in the ocean when compared to big players like PHP or Java. I'll give you the benefit of doubt and assume that you're just joking with Haskell and Scala. There are exactly ZERO Haskell jobs available in my country.

Second of all, those technologies are not Linux-centric, they are all cross-platform. A one-OS programming language/library is worthless in the present, except in rare cases such as specialized hardware-software solutions or in-house software.

This is true. Money is a better predictor for success of a platform than hacker buzz, and right now iOS is still very dominant in terms of how many users are willing and able to buy apps and in-app purchases, and how much they're willing to spend. The Android Market is still largely dominated by freeware, which is partially due to restrictions that limit the countries in which users are able to buy apps.

Yeah but the main issue with Linux versus Windows was always that Linux was more difficult to get to work than Windows, you had to do magic to get it to work with your hardware, and it was much too difficult to get to use out of the box.

Android has none of these problems, it is on a large amount of devices (more than ios), it is as shiny as Apples, but it has developers loving programming it.

Heck Linux own the server market so completely, that the only thing that could reasonably replace it would be another Unix.

> There's more hacker affection for Linux than Windows, but somehow the year of Linux on the desktop was always right around the corner.

Just like the year of Mac on the desktop, Linux is around 1% and Mac 5%... and Mac is backed by a multi-billion dollar company. I think it has more to do with Microsoft winning the desktop platform a long time ago than anything else. Where Linux and Mac can make a dent is in the web and mobile, and they already did.

just take a look at http://bit.ly/cUF0zC and see the disruption of experience there is between the myriad of flavor implementations in android... just for a single task which btw... is not implemented across all phones.

android still has a good way to go to catch up and in order to google get there they have to add more control to the experience and succeed because it is good and not because is good enough

I have been reading hello, android (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/eband3/hello-android) and it says that the multitouch is buggy and returns impossible values which tells me that it could very well be a software problem in android.

(where he's obviously forgetting that there's a universe outside of the US)

Google's not doing much better, in regards to remembering the rest of the world. Paid apps from Android App Store are only available in what? 12 countries?

My Motorola Droid's touchscreen can't match the iPhone, but I've played with a few display models, and the Droid X among others are neck-and-neck.

However, I have to say that improving hardware on my Droid would be a waste of money without large improvements in the network. Even with fantastic 3G coverage, the bottleneck for most tasks I'm looking to accomplish is the network, not the device.

If consumers aren't backing the Android phones it makes no difference if the developers are on the their side. Plus, now when you develop for the iPhone, you are almost also developing for iPad. Android still has a long way before catching up to Apple

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