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Google claims 'non-existent' Android beats everything but the Jesus Phone

'And maybe the Jesus Phone too'

eComm One day, Google believes, software developers will love its "non-existent" Android handset just as much as they love the iPhone - and maybe more.

Speaking this morning at eComm, a conference dedicated to "emerging communications," Google mobile platforms guru Rich Miner acknowledged that for the moment, Apple may have an advantage. After all, Steve Jobs and company have actually shipped a piece of hardware, while the first Android handset won't arrive until "the second half of this year." But Miner also told the crowd that Stevo hasn't treated developers as well as they deserve.

"There are certain apps you just can’t build on an iPhone," Miner said. "Apple doesn’t let you do multiprocessing. They don’t let your app run in the background after you switch to another. And they don't let you have interpretive language in your iPhone apps."

All this may be true. But even that interpretive language bit hasn't stopped Sun from a very public show of unrequited iPhone love.

Nonetheless, Miner says that Android - an open source software platform based on Linux - will soon be neck-and-neck with the Jesus Phone. "My belief is that any startup company or company that’s trying to build a popular mobile app will build it for both platforms," he said. "They’re both contemporary programming environments. As long as somebody cleanly architects their system and uses contemporary techniques. It shouldn’t be too hard to maintain multiple versions of apps across both Android and iPhone."

At that same time, Miner insists that one of the chief advantages of the Linux-based Android is that it eliminates the need for developers to maintain multiple versions of apps across multiple platforms. This was an effort to prove that Android - billed as a "handset stack" - is more than just "(another) Linux OS".

"Yes, there are lots of other Linux initiatives," he proclaimed, "but the problem is that there are lots of them. The problem is that if they just focus on the Linux OS, and they leave out all the other parts of the mobile stack.

"So, if two companies build two phones, they make two different sets of decisions about the stack. And that means the phones are different. You can't just write for one phone and move it over. You have to write for two."

So, with Android, you don't have to write for more than one platform except when you do. How to resolve this paradox? Well, maybe Miner thinks the iPhone is even more useless than he lets on.

"The iPhone was certainly one of the most thunderous mobile introductions over the past year, and Apple did a number of things right the first time with their first device - which they should be commended for. And they just launched their third party development environment.

"But because of their business model and their partnerships, certain people believe that there are control issues as well. But I’m not going into that. There are plenty of blogs that discuss that."

We're guessing that these "certain people" include Rich Miner. As you might expect, the bulk of his speech was all about Android's uber-openness.

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