Philosophically, I view Android as more oriented toward success in business, development and hacking, and use for a few reasons:
- Reason 1. Active, vibrant development community like at XDA. This means that people have a home to find new chef cooking and ROMs. This creates a meeting place for developers, documentarians, themers, and users to actively promote and discuss the platform and the applications and their use.
- Reason 2. Forums like Phandroid and Modaco that bring the users together into a viable base. Fora (or ums) are also gathering places for users to promote their use, report issues, and actually interface with the elusive developer or two
- Reason 3. Google and their choices around the platform, its open sourced-ness, and even with some bumps releasing new code goodness to the world at large. We need google to provide the tools. We can modify them, make them do more and different. The world needs an open standard for phones. iPhone and Apple could do so much more; but they tie their own hands. Too bad. There are the forest and there are the trees. The iPhone cannot see either.
- Reason 4. The users. An operating system, application, tool, technology is nothing without the users. Linux is made for users and always has been. Its answered issues around device driver support, graphics, networking. When I first started way back when, we only had support for a single sound card. Imagine that . Android users must use their one weapon to promote the system. Money and choosing to purchase quality and open tools over closed source and silo tools. Users become Android Users!
- Reason 5. Take all this and pour it into a big pot. Stir it up and let it simmer until 2012 or so and most likely earlier if apple does not change. Stir in liberal amounts of developer, user, and themers to the mix. The parts grow larger and soon the sum total is enriched by the choices all the community uses.
We are a community of users folks. We’re not just customers like with apple devices. We can make informed choices of how we use, what we use, what it looks like. There is a dark side to this whole thing and its not a bad choice. Its the absence of choice.
Thanks for reading this!
