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Ask YC: What do you think is the future of Android?

7 points by vijayshankar ↗ HN
- Does Android have a future? - How should phone manufacturers adopt or leverage it if they should (including apple)? - Though there were free mobile platforms like Linux, they were not a threat to commercial platforms like Windows Mobile. This can be attributed to other problems with free Linux, like lack of support, cost of building Linux applications to the state suitable to finally put it in a phone and sell. Now Google seems to address these issues by bundling free applications with Android platform (both from Google and from worldwide developer community). Given these aspects, is Android going to give a tough competition to mobile platforms like Windows Mobile?

14 comments

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davidw
I'm betting on it being at least somewhat successful, which is why I've been spending a lot of time working on Hecl for it.

I've talked with various other people who seem enthusiastic, because it seems to get a lot of things right: 1) open 2) backed by some muscle 3) reasonably complete API.

My biggest worry is really always-on connections and web apps, which, although they don't give you all the low-level access, are an order of magnitude easier to develop and deploy.

bayareaguy
Hecl is cool. It's what Jacl should have been. Keep up the good work.
davidw
Thanks! They have different goals though... Jacl is an implementation of Tcl, whereas Hecl is its own language, that borrows some things from Tcl, but tries to improve on it: the core is smaller, we've abandoned the "everything is a string" idea (note, however, that Tcl does not represent everything internally as a string and hasn't for 10 years), and the commands are different.

Hecl is also very targeted at applications where its small size and flexibility give it a bit of an advantage... There's no way I can compete with JRuby or things like that on standard Java, given their popularity, so I continue to target the mobile/embedded space, even though you certainly could use it as an embedded interpreter in all kinds of different Java apps.

bayareaguy
How do you think Hecl compares to Sun's own JavaFX Script / JavaFX Mobile?
davidw
Their language looks interesting, but it's fairly new. They certainly have a lot more resources to throw at it than I do, but on the other hand:

- Hecl is real, and runs on all kinds of existing mobile phones, even old ones, and is deployed in existing products.

- Hecl is not tied to Sun, so for instance the Android port has no political implications. I'm doing it because Android looks like a decent bet.

The fact that they made a scripting language at all is proof that my basic idea (scripting language for mobile phones) is on the right track. Incidentally, YC also funded a company that made something similar: http://tsumobi.com/

hcho
From a European perspective, anyone in his right mind should wait till a major handset manufacturer buys into them before starting to develop applications for it.And I must tell big names are very wary of depending on another big name for their products; hence Microsoft Mobile's miserable track record across the pond.
davidw
http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_members.html

It's not Nokia, but it's not quite 'nobody' either.

hcho
Being in the alliance does not mean that they will do large volume phone production with Android. Samsung and Motorola are always keen on being Linux consortiums. What's their Linux phones' market share in Europe?

I am not saying that Google will never make it. It will take time before they can grab a decent share. The name of the game is wait and see at the moment.

flashgordon
interestingly this could be part of the reason for the android challenge.. get a lot of developers first and hence get a lot of applications out there, which would reduce one headache for handset manufacturers - applications to bundle to the users!
eusman
whatever prediction we make has more probability to cancel it self than happening.
nickb
Android has already been delayed and there's no news about when exactly are we going to see handsets for it to come out. Also, we don't know yet who won all those spectrum auctions.

If Google did win those auctions, then Android does have a future. If they lost, I'm afraid that Android is probably not going to succeed.

Just look at how Sergey Brin is praising the iPhone and uses it all the time... that should tell you that maybe you should hedge your bets and start looking at the iPhone SDK as soon as it comes out instead of betting on Android... at least iPhone is real.

davidw
Delayed? I'm developing for it right now with the publicly available SDK. Are you referring to that TechCrunch article that got its facts wrong? The only thing that's been pushed back is the contest deadline.

Apple has a history of creating great things that are never open enough to grab a large share of the market. I'm sure the iPhone is cool and that with the SDK you'll be able to do neat things, but in terms of widespread use.... I'll wait and see.