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Comment by river_styx | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this argument, and the problem with every argument for android I've seen, is that many of the things that set it apart from iPhone are geared for developers. I don't have the actual numbers, but I'm pretty sure that developers make up a relatively small fraction of the overall mobile phone market. I mean seriously, do you think that all of these teenage girls and trendy urban types will really give a shit if a phone is built around an "open" platform?

These things look cool to us because we're the target market. No one else will care.

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There's a reason Steve Ballmer screamed "developers! developers! developers!", and it's not that he forgot to take his medications. Developers are the people who create stuff that makes a platform attractive.

This is a particularly important point when Apple is denying apps that compete with theirs, but have functionality they don't. (Podcaster, or whatever the name of the app that let people download podcasts directly to their iPhone.)

What Ballmer recognized was that if you have an environment that's friendly to developers, eventually you will have things regular users want. I'm surprised Apple doesn't seem to understand this.

Because now Windows PCs are viewed as sexy, powerful, and easy to use devices that make you cool and productive, while Apple computers are not.

Because Windows PCs are well known to be friendly to developers, with a lovely, powerful Win32 API that's a joy to use, has no horrible warts and... oh. wait.

Thanks to an accident of history (NeXT) combined with Apple killing backwards compatibility with OS9 down, they have a really developer-friendly API compared to Windows. On a purely technical level, Apple is far more developer-friendly than Windows.

They are doing their very best to shit that all away though, when it comes to the legal and backwards-compatibility side of things. That's one reason I doubt I'll ever spend my money on Apple.

That makes Apple friendly to new developers, but I would say that the backwards compatibility guarantee that Microsoft gives is pretty friendly. It's nice to know that your program will run forever, no matter what changes take place.

2 points:

1. the Win32 API is not the only thing to develop on Windows with. Personally, I find C# &.NET to be much more comfortable to program in than Objective-C & Cocoa.

2. There is no silver bullet. Some platforms are better at some things than others, but it's largely a matter of accidental complexity.

I'm not sure what your point is. I was talking about the iPhone only, not Macs.

See, that was meant as sarcasm.

That it was sarcastic was clear to me. The point you were trying to make with that sarcasm was not. (Note: I didn't downmod you.)

That was actually true back in the early 1990s, when the Windows-Android comparison was valid.

They won't care if it's open, but they might care if the openness facilitates some really useful or innovative apps.

It's interesting to me that Apple seems to be letting useless apps proliferate in the App store, yet is denying some apps that could really have value. If that is indeed the case, they are keeping one of the worst (from a consumer POV) aspects of openness and throwing away one of the best.

Right, but as a developer, I would go for the platform with large market/easy distribution built in rather than openness any day. Android may be a cool platform, but if no one is using it in the first place, why bother?

Apple knows how to market technology to regular people. So far, android only seems to be aimed at the tech crowd.

Large markets are great, but as a developer I avoid markets where I will have no idea if I can launch my product until I spend the time to develop it. It doesn't matter how big the market is if Papa Steve says I can't play in his sandbox.

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