MobUser

I’ve finally gotten some time to really sit down and look at Android. I continue to get a lot of questions about what impact Android has on Mojax and how they compare; that I thought it was high time to dig in and really understand what Android is all about.

First Impressions?

In a word … “WOW!” … I’ve been in the mobile software development world since Motorola first released a J2ME device on Nextel and I must say that Android is by far the most interesting application framework with the greatest potential for innovation than any other operating system or application framework in the market. It has all the strengths of Danger’s all-Java-all-the-time approach combined with a set of libraries and tools that make developing solutions fun and accessible to a very large developer audience.

My greatest fear is that most of the really interesting features will eventually get “nerfed” by Operators who restrict access to libraries for Multimedia, Camera, SMS, and GPS; as they have done to J2ME for years. My only hope is that a compromise will be reached wherein an application may become “trusted” in a way that is accessible to anyone that is willing to get a certificate from a trusted 3rd party and not be at the sole discretion of the Operators to “award” only approved applications with a trusted status.

What is the Impact of Android on Mojax?

What should be understood right away is that Android is as much an Operating System as it is an application framework. This is an important distinction to make as it gets right to the heart of what Mojax is all about and ultimately the most important differentiation. Mojax is all about running across multiple Operating Systems and devices, Android applications will only run on Android devices. Mojax is currently running on J2ME/MIDP2, BREW, and soon Windows Mobile. Android, from a Mojax strategy point of view, is just another device platform we will support. I really don’t see Android as a competing platform any more than I would consider .Net CF or the iPhone SDK a competitive platform. If anything, the introduction of Android (and the iPhone for that matter) will only add to the overall chaos in the mobile market … and further re-enforce the value of Mojax as a true write-once-run-everywhere application framework.

In the final analysis, I am very much looking forward to porting Mojax to Android … given our roots in Java / MIDP this should be a relatively easy task to perform. I’m also curious to see how our approach may make Android more accessible to AJAX developers and not only Java developers. In future posts I hope to explore more about Android as we go through the porting process and share my findings.