Android, another modern phone platform.

Google recently announced their “Android” phone platform. It’s an interesting gambit – the market currently has several entrenched platforms (Palm, Symbian, Windows Mobile). Here’s a video describing the Android API:

What’s interesting from my perspective is that it’s built on many technologies in common with Apple’s iPhone, such as a Unix-like kernel, WebKit for rendering web pages (also used by some Symbian-based Nokia phones), SQLite for data storage, and a GUI compositing library for rendering data to the screen. Additionally, Android supports XMPP (aka “Jabber”) which is being used by both Apple and Google for interoperable chat – Apple has shipped a Jabber server in the last two revisions of Mac OS X Server. I wouldn’t be surprised if a future version of the iPhone firmware supports chat via Jabber. From Android’s API overview, it looks like they also intend to use XMPP for other device-to-device communications (for interactive games, location notification, etc.).

Where Android differes from the iPhone is that Android’s applications are written in Java and processed into a special bytecode (i.e. not Sun’s default java bytecode) made to work well on the Dalvik Virtual Machine, which supposedly runs better on slower mobile CPU’s. This sounds, to me at least, like a way to allow compatibility between phones, as opposed to the “write once run everywhere” idea that Java was designed for. From the design, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone develops an “Android Environment” for the iPhone, but I’d expect that most applications would look like crud, as they wouldn’t fit with the iPhone UI style.

So where does this fit in with the larger phone market? It really depends on hardware support – if the hardware looks good, the UI looks good, and, more importantly, works really well, Android will be a winner. Is this likely?

Looking at the current crop of phones beyond the iPhone, I don’t think so.

It’s a good effort, and I hope it succeeds, but decentralized development in the Linux community hasn’t come up with a consistent, polished UI as of yet. From a UI perspective the ideal would be that the default applications from a small team at Google are solid and well designed, to the point that they don’t get reinvented ever time. If not… good luck Android users.