Duct Tape And Turing Machines

(Or, structured posts are for godless weenies.)

I’ve been working on a web app tailored for the iPhone for the last few weeks, over at searchableradio.com. It’s got me seriously debating between waiting to see how the first Android phones turn out and getting one of them iThingys once the initial rush dies down.

Consider this both thinking out loud and a request for comments. Raw data points follow:

• First things first, I actually do need a new phone. My current one has this habit of randomly turning off.
• AT&T is the sole service provider for the iPhone. I’m with them now, the service is quite good, but the corporate ethics are nonexistent. That said, does anyone know if any of the major cell network players didn’t drop their knickers and grab their ankles when the NSA came knocking sans warrants?
• From everything I’ve seen and read, the iPhone SDK is superb. I don’t know Objective-C, but I don’t fancy that learning Yet Another Algol-Descended Language will be that big of a hurdle. The Android SDK looks fairly nice, but Google isn’t doing a great job communicating with developers.
• Android hardware: um, where is it? There are rumors of the HTC Dream being slated for a Q4 release (and demoed at Google I/O), but no release date has been announced.
• The 2.0 iPhone firmware apparently isn’t as rock-solid as the first-gen: someone at Apple probably got a few gray hairs from the Signal vs Noise post on the matter.
• iPhone apps can only be loaded via the Apple App Store. Ok, it’s a walled garden. This isn’t as 100% evil as the FSF would have you believe- it’s arguably good news for small software shops trying to make money on their apps. You’ve got a single point of entry for millions of potential customers and you let Apple handle your app getting listed on Slashdot without disrupting sales or turning your datacenter into a smoldering pile of slag. That said, the manual approval process worries me a bit, at least without any provisions for guaranteed quick pushes for security-related updates.
• The iPhone won’t run apps as background processes. This is a big honking limitation and smells like it’s aimed at keeping folks from eschewing pay-for SMS in favor of IM apps running as daemons. Android has no such limitations.

Whichever way I decide to go, I’m pretty excited about the state of mobile development. The iPhone is setting the bar high for UI and SDK alike and there’s an awful lot of new territory to explore.