Google Android

[mikelove]

Even I think that Engadget piece is a bit harsh, actually - the Android market for commercial software may suffer the same fate as the Linux commercial software market if the platform becomes fragmented, but I still think there'll be a lot of phones using it; it's just that people won't know / care that they're Android phones, they'll simply be HTC / Motorola / Samsung / whatever phones with slick UIs, excellent web browsers and a modest but respectable catalog of third-party applications supporting them. (Google will probably still be delighted with that outcome as long as Microsoft doesn't outbid them for the default search slot on those phones) Even now, we get far more emails asking if our software works on someone's Droid / Nexus One / etc than we do asking if it runs on "Android" or "Google Phone" - brand awareness of Android remains fairly low.

[daniel123]

But I'm kind of surprised that so many more people seem to have moral objections to buying our iPhone software because of Apple than objected to buying our Windows Mobile software

I also sometimes have moral objections not buying an iPhone, but I think the main reasons I was not changing to iPhone when buying a new device two months ago were:
No instant access, no stylus, I did not know how long to wait until it will have flashcards and the price of the iPhone itself is much higher (about double than for my new WM phone).

That time I could not know that you plan to drop WM development.

I had the same with palm a few years ago: directly after I bought a TX you decided to drop palm support in future (what you in fact did not do till now . That time I sold it directly and changed everything (all my mobile software) to WM.

This time I had the same with WM. A few weeks after buying my new WM phone I heard that you will (probably) stop new develoments on WM. This time I want to keep my new WM phone for a while.

All of this "next big thing" talk about Android seems to ignore the fact that iPhone isn't exactly going away; there are only two or three real advantages Android can offer over iPhone now, and it's well within Apple's capabilities to outdo them in all of those areas in the next major

I hope the same. Maybe in a few months this changes. Maybe, but I think no need to buy an iPhone now.

Anyway, getting to your actual question, Windows Mobile support depends both on ongoing sales and on how easy it is to keep porting improvements we make on iPhone back to it; I don't think 2.0.8 will be the last WM update, anyway.

I really hope that you can still support it some time.

For the remainder of 2010 I think it's most likely we'll just be working on (lots of) iPhone improvements - many of those cool features we've been wanting to do / getting asked to do for years on Palm/WM should finally happen on iPhone - along with some sort of iPad-optimized

This sounds very good. I think to concentrate on some long time asked features first and afterwards have a look again to new strategic directions would be best at the moment.

Daniel

[mfcb]

i also agree with most of the statements in the above posts, additionally i got the feeling in the last days, that WM is not going away that soon. i wonder, if its supposed to get killed by microsoft themselves, why would they still release new beta versions of WM6.5.3 & WM6.5.5... i must say, the latest 6.5.5 solved all the memory problems i had with HTC Album, at least it did not happen since i installed (yesterday), and that was one of the first things i tried...

about the reasons for not buying from apple/ms/google, everybody has his own reasoning, definitely its not really a technical reasoning (in most cases) but the fact is there, that some people wont buy an iPhone/WM7/android device... so this problem is here to stay, and in the future there will be new devices, new reasons not to buy this/that/every device... if i want to use pleco, and it supports only platform A and/or B i just have little choices ... one of them is (for me) to use my old WM device, until there is a new device i want to have, even if that means, that pleco on my device does not have all the features i could have (some of them maybe even suggested by me, hehe)....

[westmeadboy]

If only the Nexus One was available in my neck of the woods (in New Zealand at the moment!) for a reasonable price - the importers here are trying to sell it for about $800US, compared to Google in the states selling it for $529US... The 32GB iPhone here retails for about $900US, although they are factory unlocked at least.

Yeah, I wouldn't get your hopes up about that. New Zealand is pretty much a technological backwater. Yes, we get cool stuff - several months late and at outrageous prices. You would be far better off trying to get a friend/family member in the US to ship you a Nexus One. And once you see how much FedEx/UPS charge for 3-day delivery to NZ, the Importers will probably start looking more attractive.
[/url].

http://www.expansys.co.nz/d.aspx?i=193939

which is about 670USD.

New Zealand also has access to paid apps - so its not that bad!

[ipsi]

Ehh... That's not quite right - notice how it has (excl) after the price? Indicates that it excludes GST, which adds 12.5% to that, bringing the total to more like NZ$1100/US$750. With shipping (at least NZ$65, as it comes from Hong Kong), we're looking at about NZ$1150, or US$800+. It's all these 'little' costs that really start to add up...

But yes, you're right that we do have paid apps - that they're not available in all countries is a little insane, to my mind. Anyway, I'm going to stop there before I go on a rant on how unfair it is that it costs so much to get anything cool in this tiny little country thousands of miles away from anywhere interesting. (Australia doesn't count! )

[westmeadboy]

Ehh... That's not quite right - notice how it has (excl) after the price? Indicates that it excludes GST, which adds 12.5% to that, bringing the total to more like NZ$1100/US$750. With shipping (at least NZ$65, as it comes from Hong Kong), we're looking at about NZ$1150, or US$800+. It's all these 'little' costs that really start to add up...

Ah, OK, sorry about that - teaches me to read things more carefully in future!

[westmeadboy]

But I'm kind of surprised that so many more people seem to have moral objections to buying our iPhone software because of Apple than objected to buying our Windows Mobile software because of Microsoft;

I think loads of people had a problem buying Windows devices because of Microsoft.

Its the general ethos that people don't like. Is Google perfect? No, of course not, but they seem far less likely to screw you over (as a user or developer) than Apple. Having all those "adult" apps pulled from the AppStore recently, just like that, is just one of many examples.

That's a risk to your business, isn't it Mike?

The openness of Android is precisely what makes it such a risky proposition for Pleco to support it; I see little or nothing standing in the way of Android becoming a highly fragmented platform, with software written for one particular Android device not able to run on any other Android device without extensive modifications, and possibly a dozen or more different "app stores" one has to submit to in order to get your software working on every cell carrier / phone manufacturer's Android devices.

So, I've got 9 apps on the Google Market, and I've NEVER had to do write any code/configuration for a particular device and/or OS version. It all just works. Small screens, large screens, high density screens, low density screens, SDK 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.0.1, 2.1, hardware keyboard, no hardware keyboard etc. Not one single problem. The only thing in my apps that has anything to do with multiple hardware configurations is having both hires and low res icons. But I don't even have to have that. I could just use hires icons everywhere and then Android will scale down accordingly.

I do nearly all my testing on the Nexus One and then just before release I do 5 mins testing on low res and med res screens to check layouts.

So, all this talk about fragmentation is rather unfair.

Anyway, Apple announces the iPad and now there are tens of thousands of iPhone developers downloading the iPad SDK to write an iPad specific version of their iPhone app. This is fragmentation to a much much higher degree.

Compare this to my experience when Archos released their Android internet tablet...It just worked. I didn't need to change anything. The layouts scaled perfectly. No need to recompile, nothing.

Multiple "app stores"? With the exception of the Archos Appslib store, I would imagine that 99% of developers only release their apps to the Android Market because that's where 99% of the traffic is. But lets suppose a new app store comes about and its really popular. If its really that popular then its pretty easy to spend 10 minutes uploading your app. Its just a business decision to decide whether its worth the time to go through the submission process (and whatever else is involved after that).

(yes, Android supports sideloading

Does it!? I've never heard of that - what do you mean exactly?

Mike, I'm not disagreeing with you about whether it makes sense to invest in an Android Pleco solution, its just your reasoning I'm not convinced about

[ciaocibai]

Yeah, GST in NZ is a bastard, and seems like the government is looking at putting it up to 15% soon! Glad there was another Kiwi here to explain it Curiously enough from Wellington as well. It really is a small world!

One good thing here is it's really easy to get unlocked phones, and we have a pretty good selection of them too. Just when prices get ridiculous, it kind of puts me off. Even with contracts here, prices are pretty over the top.

I think I'll wait till next time I'm in Beijing, and then see what I can pick up at a market somewhere. I already had a look on Taobao, and prices there are a lot more reasonable.

What kind of apps have you developed westmeadboy? And how is your Nexus One experience? It's interesting to know so far that everything you have developed works on all the different firmware, although I also have a slight worry there might be some fragmentation in the future.

[westmeadboy]

What kind of apps have you developed westmeadboy? And how is your Nexus One experience? It's interesting to know so far that everything you have developed works on all the different firmware, although I also have a slight worry there might be some fragmentation in the future.

Language-learning apps including bilingual dictionaries but I'm not competing with Mike

Basically, I wanted to write some simple free dictionaries so that people could do quick lookups from my main language-learning apps (which I haven't written yet). I've no plans to write a full-blown Pleco-style dictionary (with flashcards etc) - I'll leave that market segment open for Mike to occupy (much) later

The Nexus One is an amazing phone. Love the way that voice recognition works everywhere straight away. Anywhere (in system apps or third party apps) where there is a edit text box, you can speak into the mic and it will enter the corresponding text. So that worked straight away with my dictionaries without me having to do anything Just say, for example, "friend" and you will get a list of all the matches/translations without having to touch the device.

The only downside to my Nexus One is a glitch with the touchscreen where occasionally (maybe once or twice a day) the touches stop corresponding to the correct location. Workaround is to blank the display and bring it back. So it sounds like a software issue (fingers crossed).

[character]

I found these interesting articles WRT different kinds of fragmentation...
Motorola Backflip doesn't allow non-Market apps, proves AT&T doesn't get Android "It seems that Backflips are being shipped without the ability to turn on non-Market installations, meaning that AT&T has effectively locked you into getting all of your content through the walled garden."

Google Handing Out Free Nexus Ones And Droids To Top Android Devs"Google has just sent out an Email to select Android developers informing them that they are eligible to receive either a Verizon Droid or a Nexus One, as part of its ‘Device Seeding Program’."

[Zeldor]

There is certainly place for open OS for mobile. And it will take a significant amount of market. And Android will be probably the one OS to take this spot, I don't believe in good enough development of Ubuntu Mobile or smth like that. At least not in close future - it requires too much money and time to develop mobile OS.

Of course different people use Linux/Adnroid and different use Windows/WM/MacOS/iPhone. And for those people [myself included] Apple and it's attitude and policies is even worse than Microsoft's. Closed system, ignorance of advanced users, small flexibility, bugs, security problems, lack of options, extremely overpriced [how much do you pay for Apple logo?]. I'd like to use Pleco to learn Chinese, but I would never buy a device only for it [unless I needed it for my job]. I really think that it should be support for Android + either iPhone or WM. There are probably 2 groups of Chinese learners/users - business [and I doubt they will choose iPhone for their work, either old WM (new one that is coming will be more like iPhone OS probably + it may be quite hard to get Pleco working on it) or Android], 2nd group would be casual learners and they either want fun phone or good price/quality value - which pretty much means Android.

[mikelove]

daniel123 - I'm sorry the timing has worked out so badly in your case; if you think that's disappointing, though, imagine how we felt when Palm announced webOS / discontinued old-school Palm OS about 2 months after we released Pleco 2.0

mfcb - I think Microsoft still sees the value in old-school WM for enterprise apps; as I said in another thread, a doctor friend of mine still carries around a 2003-vintage iPAQ because her hospital's billing system uses an old-school Windows Mobile app. In cases like that, it's often much cheaper to keep buying extra hardware to run that one mission-critical application than it is to shell out for custom development on a brand new app for another platform. So there'll likely still be some WM hardware kicking around for a while. (heck, Acceca's about to release two new Palm OS handhelds for those users, the MEZ1500 and the PDA32)

westmeadboy - sideloading means installing non-approved apps, the whole point of jailbreaking on iPhone and the main reason why Android gets to claim to be more "open" than iPhone. Unfortunately, though, since Android is open-source, manufacturers and carriers can easily choose to turn sideloading off, and per that article character linked to, it seems like Motorola and AT&T are already doing so; it's quite conceivable that in the future a large portion of the Android phones in circulation might be just as locked-down as iPhones.

Except now we might have more than one app store to deal with, with each one imposing its own separate set of arbitrary restrictions / irrational reasons for rejecting apps / etc; we could be dealing with a dozen Apples, having to make custom builds for each and perhaps even coming up with different pricing / distribution methods depending on the market; for example, one market might allow in-app purchases while another one wouldn't, one might charge a 50% commission instead of 30%, etc.

App store fragmentation isn't going to originate with some random startup, it'll be a cell carrier deciding they want to take control for themselves over what apps are allowed to run on the phones they sell, and get a larger cut of the sales in the process; China Mobile's a top candidate for that, actually. Once one of them gets away with it, the rest will all pile in - maybe a few set up some sort of unified submission / approval process, but it still means several Mercurial App Approval Teams to deal with instead of just one.

On the development side of things, we're already seeing fragmentation in terms of which OS versions run on which hardware - I just saw a new announcement *today* of a new phone running Android 1.6. If manufacturers are maintaining their own private Android forks and only occasionally porting over new features from newer OS versions, it's inevitable the development situation will get more and more fragmented. And as you say yourself, Pleco is considerably more complicated than the apps you've developed, so just because you haven't had a problem juggling different configurations doesn't mean that we wouldn't; there are certainly lots of reports out there of certain apps / games failing to run correctly on some Android devices.

iPhone developers don't have to rewrite their apps to make them run on iPad; absent a rewrite, the apps will run with their interfaces scaled up, just as your Android application runs on the Archos tablet. However, because the iPad is expected to sell millions and millions of units, developers are choosing to take the time to redesign their interfaces to make use of all of that extra screen space. However miraculous the Android's screen-scaling algorithm may be, there's no way it can automatically redesign a 4-inch app to take full advantage of a 9-inch screen, all it can really do is scale. And every iPhone / iPod ever made can be updated to iPhone OS 3.0, while it's highly doubtful we'll see that sort of ubiquity for Android 2.0.

On the "screwing you over" front, Apple has never rejected anything we've submitted, they've never so much as sent us an email asking us to change something in the next version, and they consistently pay us twice as fast as they're contractually obligated to. On the other hand, by running AdWords ads on pirate message boards (and refusing to pull them when informed of this), Google is basically paying hackers to help people steal from us. So from my perspective, we've never been screwed over by Apple, and even as I write this we're being screwed over by Google. And were just screwed over by Microsoft a few weeks ago, and by Palm in early '09.

The only way we can really avoid being subject to the various whims of mobile platform makers is to develop a web-based version, and every time I float that idea here it seems like the overwhelming majority of people are against it, including many of the same people who are pushing an Android version. Absent that, we're always going to be in a position where one or two decisions made in a boardroom somewhere can have a devastating effect on our business.

So yes, working with Apple is risky, but Android could be just as risky - if the sideloading option does indeed go away, then even if we don't end up with Android app store fragmentation, getting pulled from Android Market might represent just as big a concern as getting pulled from iTunes is now. And if the markets do get fragmented, their small size might actually make strange app removals *more* likely, since there wouldn't be the sort of widespread blog / press outrage that comes up every time Apple pulls a bunch of apps. That may be the best protection we have against Apple misbehavior, actually - the last time a largely-unobjectionable dictionary app (Ninjawords) was rejected, an Apple VP had to personally respond to the criticism that resulted, and the app, once approved, vaulted to the top of the charts in iTunes thanks to all of the extra press.

Zeldor - Android has its own bugs / security problems, doesn't seem to beat out iPhone in price except in crappy low-end units, and is on the verge of becoming just as closed as iPhone if Motorola and AT&T have their way. I can accept the idea that it's a *comparable* platform from many users' perspectives, but I don't believe it's a *superior* one for most people.

[westmeadboy]

westmeadboy - sideloading means installing non-approved apps, the whole point of jailbreaking on iPhone and the main reason why Android gets to claim to be more "open" than iPhone. Unfortunately, though, since Android is open-source, manufacturers and carriers can easily choose to turn sideloading off, and per that article character linked to, it seems like Motorola and AT&T are already doing so; it's quite conceivable that in the future a large portion of the Android phones in circulation might be just as locked-down as iPhones.

Except now we might have more than one app store to deal with, with each one imposing its own separate set of arbitrary restrictions / irrational reasons for rejecting apps / etc; we could be dealing with a dozen Apples, having to make custom builds for each and perhaps even coming up with different pricing / distribution methods depending on the market; for example, one market might allow in-app purchases while another one wouldn't, one might charge a 50% commission instead of 30%, etc.

Ah "sideloading"! Not sure why I was thinking of in-app purchases when you wrote that. I guess the word "sideloading" is not used so much outside the iPhone world...

You paint an exceptionally bleak future of Android. All this talk of each carrier locking users down to their own Marketplace, sounds implausible to me. Certainly won't happen (to any significant degree) in Europe where unlocked phones are the norm. Do you really think the majority of Android users won't have access to the Android Market at any point in the not-too-distant future?

I can see a couple of cases where a locked-down app store is needed. In particular, China. Which is why Motorola have Shops4Apps. I just submitted a couple of my apps there. The whole process took less than 5 minutes. I didn't need to rebuild my APK (like you suggested I would). It really wasn't a problem.

Dozen Apples - Even if there are (maybe in a couple of years), so many markets - developers will only publish to no more than a few of them. Look at what's happened to Archos. They had to go through so much expense just to get devs to submit to their store. Now they have no incentives to submit, developers just don't bother submitting anything, and that market is quickly dying (AFAIK). I haven't submitted any of my new apps and/or updates to that store for months now. Its just too small a market segment.

Shops4Apps might be different because that really is reaching into a new market.

Anyway, multiple Apples - except each Apple is likely to be no worse (much better) than Apple and so the risk is much less. Even two bad-as-Apples is better than one, because then you don't have all your eggs in one basket.

Ooh, I'm getting hungry

App store fragmentation isn't going to originate with some random startup, it'll be a cell carrier deciding they want to take control for themselves over what apps are allowed to run on the phones they sell, and get a larger cut of the sales in the process; China Mobile's a top candidate for that, actually. Once one of them gets away with it, the rest will all pile in - maybe a few set up some sort of unified submission / approval process, but it still means several Mercurial App Approval Teams to deal with instead of just one.

You mean, like http://www.wholesaleappcommunity.com ?

On the development side of things, we're already seeing fragmentation in terms of which OS versions run on which hardware - I just saw a new announcement *today* of a new phone running Android 1.6. If manufacturers are maintaining their own private Android forks and only occasionally porting over new features from newer OS versions, it's inevitable the development situation will get more and more fragmented. And as you say yourself, Pleco is considerably more complicated than the apps you've developed, so just because you haven't had a problem juggling different configurations doesn't mean that we wouldn't; there are certainly lots of reports out there of certain apps / games failing to run correctly on some Android devices.

And I bet that 1.6 phone will run my apps without modification.

When I said Pleco was more complex than my c-e dictionary app, I was talking from a feature perspective (flashcards, handwriting recog, multiple dictionaries, numerous preferences) not from a technical perspective. Only the handwriting recognition sets Pleco apart from a technical point of view. (As an aside, as I have said before, users would get way more benefit to have that as an IME rather than embedded into an app - I know its not possible on an iPhone, but it is very easy on Android ). Now, a badly designed Hello World app will look rubbish on anything other the screen its designed on, but if you use proper design practices then there is no reason why an app doesn't look instantly good on a screen when scaled up 2 or 3 times...

iPhone developers don't have to rewrite their apps to make them run on iPad; absent a rewrite, the apps will run with their interfaces scaled up, just as your Android application runs on the Archos tablet. However, because the iPad is expected to sell millions and millions of units, developers are choosing to take the time to redesign their interfaces to make use of all of that extra screen space. However miraculous the Android's screen-scaling algorithm may be, there's no way it can automatically redesign a 4-inch app to take full advantage of a 9-inch screen, all it can really do is scale. And every iPhone / iPod ever made can be updated to iPhone OS 3.0, while it's highly doubtful we'll see that sort of ubiquity for Android 2.0.

By "scaled-up", I assume you mean a runtime "resize" on the whole screen (as if you were in Photoshop)? If so, then that generally looks terrible from what I've seen. I'm sure all apps that run in that mode on the iPad will look very unprofessional. Android also has that feature, but I don't think any decent developer uses it because the results are not good enough. Instead using intelligent layouts and 9-patch images (I think we talked about those before too), you get very satisfying results.

I'm sure if an Android device came out with the same specs as the iPad, my apps would look good without any modification. In fact, I think it would run pretty well on a watch phone!

Want extra icons on a HUGE screen only? - that's easily supported.

I'm interested - do you build the same package for both iPhone and iPad? Are you forking your codebase?

So yes, working with Apple is risky, but Android could be just as risky - if the sideloading option does indeed go away, then even if we don't end up with Android app store fragmentation, getting pulled from Android Market might represent just as big a concern as getting pulled from iTunes is now. And if the markets do get fragmented, their small size might actually make strange app removals *more* likely, since there wouldn't be the sort of widespread blog / press outrage that comes up every time Apple pulls a bunch of apps. That may be the best protection we have against Apple misbehavior, actually - the last time a largely-unobjectionable dictionary app (Ninjawords) was rejected, an Apple VP had to personally respond to the criticism that resulted, and the app, once approved, vaulted to the top of the charts in iTunes thanks to all of the extra press.

There's a lot of "ifs" there Mike!

Zeldor - Android has its own bugs / security problems, doesn't seem to beat out iPhone in price except in crappy low-end units, and is on the verge of becoming just as closed as iPhone if Motorola and AT&T have their way. I can accept the idea that it's a *comparable* platform from many users' perspectives, but I don't believe it's a *superior* one for most people.

I'm not aware of any security problems for Android.

Compare the top-of-the-range models:

http://www.expansys-usa.com/d.aspx?i=183742
http://www.expansys-usa.com/d.aspx?i=193887 (or 529USD from Google's website)

Check out the comparison reviews on the web, for example:

http://cnettv.cnet.com/nexus-one-vs-iph ... 83136.html
http://phonedog.com/cell-phone-videos/i ... art-3.aspx

Just about all place the Nexus One above iPhone 3GS. And just wait until HTC Desire comes out. That will blow the lot away!

[mikelove]

Locked carrier-specific stores might not happen in Europe (though IIRC there are still a number of European countries that do have locked / carrier-subsidized phones), but the US is still far and away our biggest market and they could definitely happen here. Might not even be on *all* Android phones, just the cheap ones - Verizon e.g. decides that they want to make such-and-such Android phone free with a two-year contract, but the only way they can make it work financially is to wring a few extra dollars a month out of users in other ways, so this particular phone only runs apps from the "Verizon Store" with its 50% commission and uber-complicated review process. Archos may not have been able to push people to its own store, but if millions of Verizon customers could only buy apps from Verizon Store then you can be damn sure developers would start submitting to it.

Even if everything stays on Android Market, that itself could get fragmented simply if carriers start threatening to launch their own stores - again, the 50% commission rears its head, Verizon tells Google that they'll keep Android Market only if Google gives them 25% and blocks a half dozen types of app that compete with services Verizon wants to charge its users an extra $5/month for, and Google's faced with the choice of app store fragmentation versus ticking off developers. Carriers, handset makers and mobile platform companies are all going to start eating each other now that the cellular market has been largely saturated and there's limited potential for further growth...

I wasn't suggesting rebuilds would be required for different app stores for technical reasons, but rather that they'd be required to accommodate different stores' approval requirements / sales options; it's quite possible that Android Market might start to offer in-app purchasing while Shops4Apps wouldn't, for example. Actually, the current lack of any in-app purchase system on Android is a big problem since it effectively kills our business in selling add-on dictionaries / upgrades / etc - people would be stuck with the dictionaries / features they start with. (not to mention the fact that the continued lack of SD card install support means that a great many Android users would be unable to install a "Complete"-level version of Pleco anyway)

There are a lot of technical tricks that go into Pleco that people don't necessarily notice - for example, on every platform we've ever supported we've had to do our own text rendering system since the built-in one is too slow, too inflexible, too buggy, and / or doesn't support Chinese. I have no reason to expect that Android will buck this trend, so right there we've got to start being very interested in things like pixel color order (for fast blitting). Not to mention getting searches to run nice and fast, which probably means NDK and a whole extra wave of potential compatibility issues from that. And the super-cool "live mode" web browser text lookup feature...

But even ignoring all of that, my argument wasn't that Android is fragmented right now as much as it was that it has the potential to become so - let's see if a year from now you can still write an app for an HTC phone and have it run seamlessly on a Motorola one, or if you can finally write apps that rely on Android-2.0-specific features without eliminating much / most of your potential market. It's getting to a point where phone manufacturers are basically using Android as a basis on which to build their own proprietary OSes - with the hardware all looking more and more similar it's the only way they can really differentiate themselves these days anyway - and in time this will inevitably mean diminished compatibility between different manufacturers' takes on Android.

"Scaled-up" on iPad is not just a blown-up screen, text / Apple-supplied gradients / icons / etc are all done at native resolution with scaled-up coordinates. (like pre-VGA WM apps on VGA WM devices, or pre-OS5 Palm OS apps on OS5 Palms) And a well-designed iPhone app could accommodate an iPad screen more fully (keeping toolbars small and scaling up content areas, e.g.) with little more than a recompile - intelligent layouts and scalable images are supported on iPhone too, and already something good developers use since they allow for easy orientation changes / accommodating an open keyboard / etc. There's no need to fork one's codebase for iPad, in fact the UI controls are all identical though they've added a few new iPad-specific ones, and with the current XCode builds it's pretty easy to create a "fat" application with iPhone- and iPad-specific code if you don't want to just do everything from one set of source files.

Hardware comparisons are a bit unfair since Apple only updates its iPhone hardware once a year. Which from a developer perspective is a very good thing, since it means fewer configurations to juggle, but it means that right now you're comparing just released (or not-even-released) Android phones with late-product-cycle iPhones. We'll see how top-of-the-line Android phones compare to top-of-the-line iPhones in 6 months... and Android's certainly had security problems, e.g. this one - I don't see any justification for characterizing iPhone as "less secure" than Android, every OS has its vulnerabilities.

[mikelove]

I should add that none of this necessarily convinces me Android will never be a good platform for Pleco, only that it's a very risky one to bet on right now - if Google manages to get through the rest of 2010 without letting fragmentation get worse, if they at least make a serious effort to get Motorola / AT&T to reverse course and re-enable sideloading on the Backflip (and fend off other carriers / manufacturers from disabling sideloading), that would go a long way towards reassuring me that an Android port would be a worthwhile gamble, but right now seems like just about the worst possible time to commit to Android.

Though of course, by 2011 people might have already moved on to another mobile platform, in which case we could skip Android altogether and just develop for that - who knows, maybe Nokia will pull a brilliant OS out of left field and we'll finally decide to port to Symbian after all these years.