Ask HN: Which mobile platform is your favorite? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which mobile platform is your favorite?

5 pointsDenisM18 comments

It seems the war is picking up momentum between Apple IPhone($100m VC fund), RIM Blackberry($150m VC fund) and Google Android ($10m cash prize pool) to attract mobile developers to their platforms. With that much activity Microsoft and Nokia can not be far behind, so we have a potential 5-side rumble!

Much in this battle is up to enterprising hackers - which platform would you pick and why? Which one is joy to program, which one is the pain in the neck?

It would also be fun to come back to this thread in two years and revisit our sentiments.

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I will start myself having programmed both for Google Android and Windows Mobile.

In the grand scheme of things, the two platforms are comparable in the amount of joy and pain they cause and it takes roughly the same amount of effort to get things done.

Windows Mobile:

+ C# (popular, easy to learn language)

+ IDE with debugging

- IDE costs money

+ Decent compatibility, debug once - run anywhere

- Compatibility is not perfect - there are two distinct flavors (touchscreen and non-touchscreen) and while its possible to write compatible code it still takes effort

+ Native Emulators for different form factors

- Network connectivity in emulator is a pain to configure

+ Once you configure it you can simulate network conditions very well

-- Windows Forms UI is quite primitive and does not have even basic layout. Huge pain in the neck. I hate it.

- The View and Controller of Model-View-Controller are merged into one (class Form), as a result you can't easily separate View from business logic. Thus it is harder to test.

+ Allocation profiler and unit tests

- No regular profiler, no code coverage

- Stagnant - very little has changed in recent times

+ Large install base (10 mil)

Android:

+ Java - popular, easy to learn language

+ Single UI model for all devices (touchscreen)

+ Free IDE with debugging (Eclipse)

+ Working network connectivity in debugger

- Not as rich connectivity options

- Debugging is half-assed - it hangs all the time (search for "19% bug") and you can't eval random expressions, only local variables. But then again it gets the job done.

+ The Intent / Activity / View model is nice - View and business logic are separated. It's also quite cool that application consists of late-bound activities - basically you can expand existing application by developing a newer implementation of existing activity. In other words, it's hackable that way. The whole way how Google rethought the idea of "application" is very fresh and I like it - it seems to make sense to me.

+ Regular Profiler (don't remember about unit tests and allocation profiler)

+ Rapidly evolving

- zero install base

From the software engineer's point of view, there can be no question that Symbian is by far the nicest platform to work on. It's got the same two decades of heritage as pretty much every other popular operating system that exists today, but it shows what can be achieved if the people who designed the OS in the 80s were thinking clearly about the future.

It's so refreshing to work on an Operating System where character sets aren't anything you have to worry about, that has Unicode designed in to every component from the file server on up. To use processes rather than DLLs as the basic unit of code reuse is just great, and with platsec to have a decent mechanism for policing access to those processes... Well, I could go on and on, but I better not.

It also helps to have a quarter of a billion phone installed base, and almost 1 in every 10 phones shipped being a Symbian phone. Not just Smartphones, mind, all types of phone.

Based on what's happening today, I'd say that (1) Symbian will take control of the phone-first-computer-second market and, (2) Windows Mobile will slowly take over the computer-first-phone-second market, (3) Apple's marketshare will mirror its computer marketshare, (4) Android will get squeezed out of the market unless there is an ad-subsidized phone revolution (unlikely), (5) Either Nokia or Microsoft will buy RIM, and (6) price is going to be a much bigger factor in the long-run at the top of the market, and Nokia, Samsung, and Sony-Ericcson have a big advantage there because of its experience building mass-market feature phones.

Look at what is happening today at MWC: Samsung, Sony-Ericcson, and Nokia all announced amazing Symbian-powered devices. HTC and LG both made huge commitments to Windows Mobile, and Windows Mobile got a huge upgrade. Meanwhile, Android was almost absent from the show, and Apple literally didn't even show up.

There's only one commercially-available Android phone, being subsidized by only one major operator (AFAICT). I can't find any evidence that it is gaining any momentum; in fact, the evidence seems to show that Symbian has gained a lot of momentum at its expense. Besides that, Symbian just seems technologically superior. Nokia just announced a Symbian-powered phone with a one-MONTH standby time. The G1 cannot even last through a single day. If you've programmed for both, you can see why: everything about Symbian's design revolves around a relentless desire to conserve resources. Android's main contribution might end up being the open-sourcing of Symbian.

The iPhone gained a lot of mindshare but soon it will be one out of many similar devices. Feature-for-feature, every single other manufacturer has them beat, hands down. The iPhone's only advantage is in ease-of-use. That's a big advantage now, and the iPhone will continue to thrive as long as its competitors provide sub-par user experiences. But, once the other vendors get their acts together, the iPhone won't have any advantage whatsoever. The same applies to Mac OS X on the desktop as well.

Samsung, Nokia, and Sony-Ericsson are close to having application binary compatibility across their smartphones. And, Nokia has started moving Symbian down market into midrange phones. If they can all agree to build compatible phones and if S60 replaces Series 40, Symbian will have an absolutely massive market share.

I think Windows Mobile will succeed in the corporate world if they can build enough tools into the platform to make building mobile enterprise applications as easy as they've made enterprise development on the desktop. At some point I think Microsoft's leverage in the corporate IT world will cause a lot of problems for Blackberry.

I like iPhone now through next summer, an iPhone/Android 60/40 split afterward over the following year, by which time (two years from now) RIM should be in trouble, possibly even worse than Microsoft, who knows how to make software, hardware, and SDKs, and might release a great business phone with 3G, WIFI, and a great keyboard by then (that of course uses Exchange ActiveSync instead of the required $60-100/mo per phone Blackberry connection plan that RIM requires.)

I'm still skeptical that anything will make a dent in RIM's core base. They might shut it out in the consumer market, but not business. iPhones are clearly never going to, unless they offer a model with a dedicated keypad and multiple carriers. Android, we'll see about, but I suspect the Blackberry brand name is one of the most valuable around and will withstand a lot.

Thanks for your response. If HTC, Palm, Sony, Nokia, or anybody else releases a great Google Android or Microsoft Windows Mobile phone for business use that comes with a great keyboard and is equivalent in functionality to a Blackberry, with easy-to-use developer-focused SDK's that Google and Microsoft have, while Blackberry sticks with their (from what I hear) poor platform and continues to charge a big extra monthly fee for their data plans, I can imagine RIM will be stuck in an unfortunate situation two years from now, as Palm is today.

In my opinion of how quickly things can turn around, Palm used to be the darling of the Apple world, having roots in Apple's Newton project, and the PalmOS operating system supported Macs while Windows devices did not. As soon as the iPhone came out, Mac users of Palm Treos were probably the first in line to buy the real thing (an Apple phone). Also, Palm themselves put Windows on their phones even before the announcement of the iPhone (turned out to be a good decision for them, since they weren't doing much with the PalmOS, because they couldn't really modify it after all--they chose to have backwards compatibility in order to state that they have over 60,000 applications.)

There's also the issue that RIM, a Canadian company, is the only company that forces every message to go their country before it reaches its destination, which means state and federal government officials, and the military, will have an easy choice to use one of the other platforms, as many departments have done already in the United States. The governments in France and India have also voiced such concerns to ban the Blackberry.

Note that I am not referring to stock prices here, but the general status of the platforms at that time.

"If HTC, Palm, Sony, Nokia, or anybody else releases a great Google Android or Microsoft Windows Mobile phone for business use that comes with a great keyboard and is equivalent in functionality to a Blackberry,"

Well, they kind of did. There are many phones that run Windows Mobile and do all the email/calendar quite well. This is my phone for example: http://tinyurl.com/64jtkq T-Mobile dash. It has keyboard, does all the push-email with Exchange thingy and runs the software that I write for it.

My biggest problem with it is outdated UI programming model (Windows Forms), but judging by posts here it is a nice problem to have compared to what RIM offers.

Exactly. But I wasn't touting Windows Mobile, which I have never used. I am touting the proven track record Microsoft, Apple, and Google have of serving developers more than any other company (Amazon might be another one because of AWS, and they too have a mobile/cellular product, the Kindle). They have designed lots of great software and Software Developer Kits. RIM does a terrible job and has no such experience.

After some research (I didn't before because this was supposed to be just a fun prediction thread we can look back on after one year), I found experts agree:

http://www.appletell.com/apple/comment/rim-switching-to-ipho...

http://www.berryreview.com/2008/03/12/rim-is-nurturing-the-d...

I don't think I disagree with you, I just don't think that is relevant to the corporate world. Corporations don't want their workers installing third party apps on their phones, that's jut more IT headache for them. They want a device that enables their employees to communicate effectively. Nothing does that like a Berry. And even if it did, the cost of switching would keep everyone using Berries.

Thanks for the response. That's very true today. But I am assuming that among Microsoft/Google/Apple, 3rd parties will use their SDKs Android's open source to create business applications and integrations that will make the Blackberry look lame and expensive in two years, so much so that PalmOS and RIM's OS and SDKs will look lame not just to developers, but users as well.

There are currently many problems right now. Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync is free per device, but flaky. As well, IT has to install iTunes on user machines to allow business users to activate and sync the devices. Finally, Apple does not allow IT to disable iPod functionality on their business iPhones. I am betting that these huge problems will be addressed before two years from now. My point is that there will be a noticeable dent in Blackberry use (as long as good keyboards accommodate the phones running these new OS); I'm sure RIM will still have a good stock price and profits two years from now.

I don't know. There are lots of great WinMo phones out there that do everything a BlackBerry does but without needing a BlackBerry Enterprise Server. But everybody has BESes and BlackBerries, and all of their employees are used to BlackBerries, so the momentum is enormous and nobody is switching. The costs for a Fortune 1000 company to do so are prohibitive, and the incentive minimal since the Berries work so well.

Also, BlackBerries still have keypads superior to all hardware alternatives. I've owned Treos and a Moto Q, and I picked up a newish Berry and could tell the difference immediately. That's far and away the most important feature to a frequent emailer.

It's entirely possible that an Android phone will match that, but lots of people have tried over the last decade and none have come anywhere close. But even if they do, they have to make inroads against the massive numbers of installed BESes. That's going to take a long time in the corporate world.

Symbian is a pain in the neck to program for, but you can do anything you want on it, and it has (and will have) a huge marketshare. iPhone and Android are a walk in the park but they both have severe limitations (especially the iPhone). The iPhone is the easiest one to deploy to (thanks to the App Store). I don't have any experience with WinMo. So far, Symbian is my favorite.

The web. I just don't see the point in native apps these days when you can do pretty much all of it via webapps.

That's an excellent point. One of my favorite bloggers Michael Mace put a very detailed argument to that end:

http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2008/02/mobile-applica...

[quote] Summary: The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices. The problems are so bad that the mobile web, despite its many technical drawbacks, is now a better way to deliver new functionality to mobiles. [/quote]

The web, alas, is slow.

One interesting idea I have is potential of convergence between two worlds,manifesting itself in Flash mobile and Silverlight mobile. Maybe these are the future then.

Android: it's open source. It might not be an initial advantage against something like iPhone, but in the end, I think it's very compelling.

Symbian is effectively open-source now (if a handset manufacturer wants it, they can get it), and it will be officially open-source soon.

What about OpenMoko? It will soon become available to the masses, it's fully open, cheap, extendable etc.

While I've met many of the guys who work at OpenMoko and think they're great engineers, OpenMoko just isn't any sort of serious mobile platform. They can't even claim the kind of industry support SavaJe had before they went tits up.

They're also making a touch screen handset/platform which makes them automatically a niche player everywhere except China. If one of the first tier handset manufacturers expressed some interest in the platform, it might be worth considering, but in advance of that extremely unlikely event it's just an amusing novelty.

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