Our network blog last100 has an interesting interview with Nicolas Gramlich, founder of anddev.org – an online community for Android developers. As editor Steve O’Hear notes in his intro, there have been issues with Google’s mobile OS of late – an incomplete and buggy SDK, favoritism towards select developers, lack of transparency, and concerns that the platform could become fragmented and that Google has ceded too much control to carriers. But all those problems may fade into the ether if, as Gramlich claims in the last100 interview, “Android is for the masses, iPhone for the rich”.
Android is Google’s mobile operating system and competes with the likes of Apple’s OSX for iPhone and Nokia’s Symbian open source OS. Gramlich told Steve O’Hear that “there will be a great variety of Android devices all over the world, where there will always be just the iPhone.” He also dismissed the threat of Nokia and its recent acquired controlling interest of open source mobile OS, Symbian. “I think Android will win over Symbian”, said Gramlich, “as there are so many companies behind the Open Handset Alliance.”
So what draws developers like Nicolas Gramlich to Android? Gramlich says that “Android’s main attraction is its simplicity” and that this enables the rapid development of “feature-rich applications”.
Asked by Steve O’Hear what kind of apps we can expect from Android, Gramlich replied that “we will definitely see a lot of location-aware and social-networking applications, that will try to be the social app for Android. I’ve seen so many that I cannot even count them.” He noted that integration with Google Maps is especially tight, which he says doesn’t currently exist on other mobile platforms. Indeed his own Android app is a free navigation app called AndNav! (screenshot below).
Despite all the positive attributes of Android, currently it is vaporware (no commercial phones running Android yet exist) and there has also been developer unrest because the SDK hasn’t been updated for some time. Gramlich admits that “the next SDK has to be overwhelming to get Android back on track”.
For the full interview, hop over to last100. Also see last100’s recent interview with the zintin CEO talking iPhone, Android and mobile future.
