4 ms·

Any company can adopt the open source OS to get into the cellphone market and, thus, the Android ecosystem will consist of many disparate and incompatible inter

by pxlpshr 18y ago

Any company can adopt the open source OS to get into the cellphone market and, thus, the Android ecosystem will consist of many disparate and incompatible interests. wow, couldn't agree with this more. this is exactly why I've been on the fence about going after Android till it matures a little more. Apple is closed-platform, and I understand that its often an issue in the hacker community but I honestly see it as an enabler... particularly for indies and small shops. Until the iPhone and OSX, gone were the days of the small teams. To build for Windows configurations, you often had huge cost sinks like support and QA... likewise for the gaming industry. Now hackers have things Microsoft's XNA and the iPhone that are giving small, visionary teams the ability to create AND MORE IMPORTANTLY produce to the WORLD out of their garage (oh, and reap direct fiscal rewards).

halo 18y ago
Once again, the web, a completely open standard and largely built on open-source software. The web has done much more for "hackers", "indies" and "small shops" than the iPhone, OS X and XNA have /combined/. Let's not forget that the iPhone bases much of its popularity on the web either.
- pxlpshr 18y ago
  I think your point can tip in either direction because I see the "open success" of the consumer web relying a lot on 3 or 4 dominant browsers who are tackling the hardware issue for you, thereby giving you a platform to develop on. Not to dissimilar from the benefits of working with Adobe AIR / Silverlight. What the web doesn't offer is a direct publishing path to the consumer, where commerce occurs with one-click, and installation is seamless. +1 for XNA and iPhone.
- Angostura 18y ago
  ... because it is so much fun developing for IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Lynx, et al.
philh 18y ago
I'm not sure that fragmentation is necessarily what killed small teams, at least for video games - my understanding is that they survived pretty well in days when you had the NES, Commodore 64, Amiga, Apple II, etc. And many (most?) games got ported to several of those, whether by the original team or another, so customers weren't especially put out either. What killed small teams was that it became impossible to produce and sell a modern video game as one. XNA is making that possible again. Likewise, the iPhone makes distribution easy for mobile phone apps. If Android can replicate that, then hackers will be able to find ways to deal with variable featuresets. They'll lose some simplicity, but openness will give them benefits as well. I think it will be a net win for customers and developers, but I'm not certain. Time will tell.

by pxlpshr 18y ago

halo 18y ago

Once again, the web, a completely open standard and largely built on open-source software. The web has done much more for "hackers", "indies" and "small shops" than the iPhone, OS X and XNA have /combined/. Let's not forget that the iPhone bases much of its popularity on the web either.

pxlpshr 18y ago
I think your point can tip in either direction because I see the "open success" of the consumer web relying a lot on 3 or 4 dominant browsers who are tackling the hardware issue for you, thereby giving you a platform to develop on. Not to dissimilar from the benefits of working with Adobe AIR / Silverlight. What the web doesn't offer is a direct publishing path to the consumer, where commerce occurs with one-click, and installation is seamless. +1 for XNA and iPhone.
Angostura 18y ago
... because it is so much fun developing for IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Lynx, et al.

philh 18y ago

I'm not sure that fragmentation is necessarily what killed small teams, at least for video games - my understanding is that they survived pretty well in days when you had the NES, Commodore 64, Amiga, Apple II, etc. And many (most?) games got ported to several of those, whether by the original team or another, so customers weren't especially put out either. What killed small teams was that it became impossible to produce and sell a modern video game as one. XNA is making that possible again. Likewise, the iPhone makes distribution easy for mobile phone apps. If Android can replicate that, then hackers will be able to find ways to deal with variable featuresets. They'll lose some simplicity, but openness will give them benefits as well. I think it will be a net win for customers and developers, but I'm not certain. Time will tell.