At first sight iPad developers are lucky ones when compared to some of their colleagues
The Android OS provides developers with much more freedom and independence.
Despite lots of difficulties presented at the market mobile developers are engaged
Instead of security and safety Google tried to make its own mobile platform attractive emphasizing other advantages such as the power of creativity and relative freedom of choice. Free Android platform can be everything a developer might want. But of course there is always a fly in the ointment.
In general, the Android platform has survived a long way from an operating system purely for geeks, crazy about a possibility to add their own alterations to the source code to a very dignified platform for people quite far from the development community. With every new release the OS gained functionalities and became more and more elaborated. Of course, every new iteration was accompanied with a new SDK released and all the tools necessary for the successful development, but the whole process of shifting to a new version was not well organized due to many reasons. The 4 major Android versions presented today at the market are one of the most obvious results of such a strategy. Of course, Google can hardly be blamed for it as it’s mainly a carriers’ fault which spend too much time upgrading their own UIs. The thing is it is Google itself which will have to deal with the situation and manage the problem of the platform fragmentation. But Google seems to pay quite little attention to it.
With the potential release of tablets running the Android the company seems to foster the fragmentation process. The current OS iteration – Froyo, which was released somewhere this spring – seemed to possess all the features a tablet owner might like to have. It’s no surprising, Samsung and Toshiba were glad to have a quality operating system installed on their devices and announced the release of Galaxy and Folio 100 correspondingly. While consumers were mouth watering to obtain a new gadget, Google representatives revealed some shocking news that Froyo is not optimized for running on a tablet. The time for such a revelation was chosen exceptionally well, as the both tablets were in production by then. In addition, the news confused lots of Android developers who really did not know what to do and what side to choose. It is evident that Froyo can be run on tablets but with a range of reservations. Lots of apps submitted to the Android Market are not designed for such devices, and thus will perform badly when run at them. Google representatives do not make any official announcements concerning the best iteration for tablets. Maybe the next one – Gingerbread will be better. However a range of manufacturers preferred not to risk and wait until Honeycomb is released at the beginning of next year.