On Tuesday, May 24, 2011 11:29:03 AM UTC-4, DanH wrote: Additionally, Android, as it's currently designed, does not have > "legs". The process model and UI are both too restrictive to be > extendable to the pads and other new paradigms of the future.
While I would agree that there are some unfortunate and limiting decisions in the design of android (but maybe not agree with you about which those are), I'm not sure that this actually matters that much in the long run. The thing that android has is momentum. If you look around, it's almost like every company who wants to think they are in the consumer electronics business is now offering, or working on offering, their own android device. And I think that's very important; the original IBM PC wasn't perfect either, and some of its issues are with us today, but a large enough variety of interests jumped on the bandwagon and adapted it to tolerably accomplish the huge variety of things they needed. A possible relief-valve for what one person or another may see as a limitation of android is that it's not necessarily clear what android has to be in order to be android. A mobile phone operating system? Well, there are now non-phones. A framework built on linux? I hear someone can run apps on QNX and someone else hopes to on Windows. Linux with an apache userspace? I expect someone has or is working on a GNU version. Dalvik? Someone will run a more conventional java, and someone else will re-implement the core APIs in C++. Software at all? People are putting Ubuntu on devices sold for android. As more and more interests get involved, I expect we will see a someone offering a contrasting alternative to every possibly controversial aspect of "android", created so that some interest can leverage what they do like about the platform (or the supply momentum behind it) while working around the aspect that doesn't work for them. Chris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
