Moving to Android
According to some news sources, the Android OS now has a 95% share of the market in China. Apple now only has about 4% of this huge, growing market. China may have been overlooked by the big western vendors a little, but Androids openness has allowed Chinese manufacturers to produce their own versions for copycat devices, and this may well have helped the user base to grow so rapidly.
What does this mean for the mobile market worldwide? Well, with the current problems at Microsoft (Sinofsky being ousted) and Apple (the unfortunate death of Steve Jobs), Android may well be poised to completely dominate. Android is Linux based, which is really attractive to young hackers and developers, and it is very easy and cheap to get hold of the development SDK for Android, so it gives techies the kind of exciting environment to play in, that has been lacking for many years. Ofcourse, this openness does make everything a bit looser, and a bit more 'wild west', but that makes it a lot more exciting.
Personally, I'm a bit bored with the whole Microsoft development environment. I jumped onto the .NET bandwagon during the Beta 2 phase, and have put huge amounts of time and energy into increasing my knowledge, and becoming more fluent within the framework. I have learnt to build ASP web sites, windows apps, web services, console apps, services, silverlight, and WPF apps. But, its getting a little confusing. Silverlight and WPF were not simple to learn - the presentation layer is radically different from any previous technology I have worked with, and it takes a lot of effort to get into the mind set. And what now? Well, Windows 8 is out, which uses the Metro interface (also XAML based like WPF), and will require a new phase of adjustment and discovery. Developers like myself will need to spend more money on books, online tutorials, and lots of stressy example code will be tried out. And then what? How do we know that Metro wont be scrapped for Windows 9? Perhaps they will re-jig it. It's great to have top class development tools, but the rate of change is staggering, and is only getting faster. Microsoft obviously have huge amounts of resources, and need to keep hundreds of developers busy by constantly re-engineering their platforms and bringing out new standards. Its all getting a bit much to be honest.
With Android having such a huge user base, and Apple and Microsoft looking increasingly shaky, I'm seriously considering picking up the Java books again, and start writing apps for Ice cream sandwich. I've always like Linux anyway, but have found its development tools to be a little sparse (HTML designers especially), but now that the games market is going to be exploited -steam are jumping the MS ship, I'm sure that Linux will really start to grow, and be taken up by more home users. After all, it's free, reliable, and has a huge range of free apps begging to be downloaded. It's also great for teen hackers, as it is easy to set up a Java, PHP or python development environment and get going.
I'm not sure what to do yet, but Linux and Android is starting to look a whole lot more inviting.
What do you think?
What does this mean for the mobile market worldwide? Well, with the current problems at Microsoft (Sinofsky being ousted) and Apple (the unfortunate death of Steve Jobs), Android may well be poised to completely dominate. Android is Linux based, which is really attractive to young hackers and developers, and it is very easy and cheap to get hold of the development SDK for Android, so it gives techies the kind of exciting environment to play in, that has been lacking for many years. Ofcourse, this openness does make everything a bit looser, and a bit more 'wild west', but that makes it a lot more exciting.
Personally, I'm a bit bored with the whole Microsoft development environment. I jumped onto the .NET bandwagon during the Beta 2 phase, and have put huge amounts of time and energy into increasing my knowledge, and becoming more fluent within the framework. I have learnt to build ASP web sites, windows apps, web services, console apps, services, silverlight, and WPF apps. But, its getting a little confusing. Silverlight and WPF were not simple to learn - the presentation layer is radically different from any previous technology I have worked with, and it takes a lot of effort to get into the mind set. And what now? Well, Windows 8 is out, which uses the Metro interface (also XAML based like WPF), and will require a new phase of adjustment and discovery. Developers like myself will need to spend more money on books, online tutorials, and lots of stressy example code will be tried out. And then what? How do we know that Metro wont be scrapped for Windows 9? Perhaps they will re-jig it. It's great to have top class development tools, but the rate of change is staggering, and is only getting faster. Microsoft obviously have huge amounts of resources, and need to keep hundreds of developers busy by constantly re-engineering their platforms and bringing out new standards. Its all getting a bit much to be honest.
With Android having such a huge user base, and Apple and Microsoft looking increasingly shaky, I'm seriously considering picking up the Java books again, and start writing apps for Ice cream sandwich. I've always like Linux anyway, but have found its development tools to be a little sparse (HTML designers especially), but now that the games market is going to be exploited -steam are jumping the MS ship, I'm sure that Linux will really start to grow, and be taken up by more home users. After all, it's free, reliable, and has a huge range of free apps begging to be downloaded. It's also great for teen hackers, as it is easy to set up a Java, PHP or python development environment and get going.
I'm not sure what to do yet, but Linux and Android is starting to look a whole lot more inviting.
What do you think?
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