The Industry

To support smart phones or not to…

As many have notes, first it was Microsoft IE that was a obstacle in the write once, run everywhere dream of every hard working programmer programming their heart out.

And we thought THAT was bad. Ha!

Now we have Apple, with its (yes, it is theirs, who else would want it?) horrifically antique Objective-C giving us yet another hurdle with the iPhone SDK. OK, so write twice run everywhere, right? We just have to delay every release, reduce overall functionality, and release that Objective-C is for baby apps, and not try anything that is real and substantial with it if we want our sanity to survive until 2112 (when we all die anyway, right? :-))

Then we have Google’s Android and Android development and Java (better than Objective-C, by a million miles of gray hair, yes indeed, but still growing a little moldy on the vine) but at least they allow cross compiling (unlike Apple).

Now we have the iPad.

So the write once, write twice, uh write four times, run a lot of places paradigm is kaput.

Small developers just do not have the resources to develop for four platforms. So they will have to pick one. Let’s see…. the internet? Kind of crowded with 100M’s of competitors. The smart phone? Like the CD ROM apps before it, all the baby apps have been done to death - the next gen smart phone apps will have to have a substantial back end that provides some kind of interesting functionality (i.e. not Foursquare).

So that leaves the iPad. So all the small developers have to develop for it because they at least have a chance [and it is cool and fun, too, which doesn’t hurt :-)]. And large developers have the resources to throw money at everything. But how about the little guy who has already started developing for platform X - what do they do? They can’t afford to add support for yet another platform. They bite their fingernails.