Re:Why all my iOS Apps are on hold - or iCloud sucks Part II
by cageface on Thursday February 07, 2013 @09:38PM
(#5185987)
I understand the short-term reasoning for choosing Java. Unfortunately mobile is one platform where transparent access to native code is a huge advantage and Java/JNI puts Android at a huge disadvantage here compared to Obj-C/C++.
This is why writing something like a Twitter client is actually much easier in Android but doing something really interesting like realtime multimedia or highly responsive, complex UIs is difficult to the point of impossible in some cases.
That's a mistake at a level above engineers and software architects (or at least a mistake so far - if, hypothetically, Intel managed to crack their mobile CPU problem the choice of Java would turn out to be very smart). This is the dual of Apple's situation with iCloud. The strategic choice to start building out cloud services to support their ecosystem is clearly the right one, it is the implementation that has missed the mark (so far).