Note my phrasing, I'm aware of OSS apps. I'm sure the development experience is less extreme on android but smartphone development is nothing like the experien

Note my phrasing, I'm aware of OSS apps. I'm sure the development experience is less extreme on android but smartphone development is nothing like the experience on the PC where dev tools (visual basic/TCL/python/bash even gcc) are very lightweight and easy to work with. On the iphone you actually have to send apple money and sometimes even fax them a copy of your drivers license. Yes, you can have "open source smartphone apps" (although it's much closer to source available since the users really have no way to modify it) but you absolutely can't have community maintained software (again, on the iphone. You can on android in theory but the tooling really doesn't seem built for sharing with other people.)