>However, I was wrong - the Java/Dalvik as a first class is actually better, Google got the possibility to be CPU-architecture independent. Just about anything

>However, I was wrong - the Java/Dalvik as a first class is actually better, Google got the possibility to be CPU-architecture independent. Just about anything would have been better than Java. I'm not a big fan of C#, but CLR would have been better. Even JavaScript would have been better. But an intermediate VM language (like the LLVM intermediate representation) would have been the best option, if CPU architecture targeting were the concern. I do games, primarily. And writing games in Java (which is what Google tells you to do -- though they finally gave in to pressure and added the NDK) just sucks, because you have to ship the JDK when shipping on every other platform -- or you need to write your game twice. So pretty much every major game uses C/C++ despite it being the ugly stepchild of Android. Google set up the dev environment so that you can add as many target architectures as you want, making your APK "fat", or alternately shipping various APKs with different architectures in them and letting the store pick the appropriate version. Which works, but is ugly. C and C++ have been CPU-architecture-independent for a long time, and if they DIDN'T want to force the multi-binary approach, using LLVM to build to an intermediate language and compiling for each platform would have been an even better fix. Intel and MIPS are not first-class citizens, by the way, because the NDK exists, and many developers still only ship ARM binaries. And while other platforms ship with ARM emulators, they're buggy: An app I'm currently working on just fails on MIPS, and there are few enough people with MIPS devices that the client decided to just not support MIPS (our build process uses libraries that aren't build using the Android.mk system, so I can't just add "mips" to the platform list).