Candid 10,000 feet thoughts about Android

Android is the new mobile platform developed by Google. They released the SDK yesterday. Basically a Linux kernel, a mobile optimized virtual machine running Java, and a set of API to play with the phone.

First of all, the usual disclaimer. I am not a mobile developer, I am not much of a UI developer, but I am a Java developer and mobile consumer. Anyway, I'll give you some of my thoughts.

Android is yet another platform. We already had Symbian, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Java ME, Mac OS X, you name it. So yet another platform to support when writing a mobile app, year!

Sounds pretty bad for Sun and Java ME. I don't know the specific deal that Sun did with Google for embedding the Java technology into Android but I hope it's a good one for Sun because Java ME will suffer from the Android platform:

• it's "Java" enough for people to think twice before writing a Java ME app
• it's not Java ME, it's not Java SE, it's a subset of Java SE, so practically a different platform to target
• it's not a Java VM, so no need to pay any IP-related royalties to Sun
  
• it's not the Sun's Java ME virtual machine, so no need to pay Sun some license fee

Last grief. From the live demo you can watch on Youtube (especially minute 3:32), they have a long way to go before having a UI as responsive as the iPhone at least in the screen touch area. Plus they probably don't have multi touch events yet ;p

That being said, it seems to be a smart move from Google in three ways:

• it's a free platform for any mobile constructor (quite appealing)
  
• the notion of intent allows the user to replace one application with another in a very sleek way (sort of the loose coupling dream made true), making Android potentially an open platform even for the user
  
• they leverage all the Java developer base
  

Plus you can define your UI declaratively (XML), that's a smart move too.

So Android is a very open platform, but don't forget one thing: it's so open that your phone carrier can lock it down as much as it wants :)

As an iPhone user, I'm relieved a bit, my investment is worthwhile.