Re:Maemo vs. Android
by Tuna-Fish on Tuesday December 08, 2009 @11:07AM
(#983914)
The way I see it, Nokia, Apple and the others are no longer selling phones, they are selling computers that happen to fit in your pocket. And as for any computer, the quality of the computer itself is not really very relevant anymore, what matters is the applications that you run. Even if user experience iPhone is the next best thing since sliced bread, if android or maemo sucks up all the application development in the future, iPhone will become a footnote in history.
This is what they all are competing for, the hearts and minds of the app developers.
Android's strategy seems to be guaranteeing as many phone implementations as possible, to guarantee app developers the best bang for the dev time.
Maemo is carrying with it a complete unix platform that people have written software for a couple of decades now -- being able to run old desktop software doesn't do you that much, but there has been a lot of competent Maemo developers for way longer than the platform has existed. Also, there are very many different ways to develop software for it -- I believe Nokia is gunning for making PySide their "Visual Basic", a platform that is really easy and quick to develop qui apps on. On the other hand, if you have experience on developing qui stuff on windows, Qt/C++ is not that far from what you are used to.
And Apple, on the other hand, gives developers a closed-down app store, an esoteric language, ridiculous limitations on what the software is allowed to ship with and outright scary application rejection process -- what if I spend half a mil developing the next best thing since sliced bread for iPhone and Apple finds it recreates some of the functionality of the phone?
This is what they all are competing for, the hearts and minds of the app developers.
Android's strategy seems to be guaranteeing as many phone implementations as possible, to guarantee app developers the best bang for the dev time.
Maemo is carrying with it a complete unix platform that people have written software for a couple of decades now -- being able to run old desktop software doesn't do you that much, but there has been a lot of competent Maemo developers for way longer than the platform has existed. Also, there are very many different ways to develop software for it -- I believe Nokia is gunning for making PySide their "Visual Basic", a platform that is really easy and quick to develop qui apps on. On the other hand, if you have experience on developing qui stuff on windows, Qt/C++ is not that far from what you are used to.
And Apple, on the other hand, gives developers a closed-down app store, an esoteric language, ridiculous limitations on what the software is allowed to ship with and outright scary application rejection process -- what if I spend half a mil developing the next best thing since sliced bread for iPhone and Apple finds it recreates some of the functionality of the phone?