MacDailyNews Take: Yet another reason to get an Apple iPhone. It’s much more likely that not only is there an app for that, but the app was probably built for iPhone first.
Johnson reports, “Not even 2 years old, [Google’s] Android is already a poster child for the fragmentation stymieing the development of software applications for smartphones.”
“The Nexus One will run on version 2.1 of Android, and the Droid soon will. But other popular Android phones are stuck on version 1.6, which doesn’t run many apps written for the newer releases,” Johnson reports. “And many apps written for version 1.6 can’t run on version 1.5, which is still prominent in the Android market.”
“But there may be a lifeboat on the horizon… The new standard, called HTML5, has been in development for more than 5½ years. The idea is de-emphasize hardware-specific technologies like Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash, which doesn’t run on iPhones or most Android phones, and Sun Microsystems’ JavaFX, which won’t work on any phone that doesn’t support Java in some form.”
Johnson reports, “While work on HTML5 is expected to continue for many years, some of its elements are scheduled to be implemented this year. Eventually, developers should be able to to build graphically rich ‘Web apps’ that to the end user look and behave like native apps — even though they’re actually run in the Web browser, making them usable on every smartphone that has a compliant browser.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: HTML5 will solve certain problems, but the best apps will still take advantage of platform specific hooks.