So the iPhone may be the prettiest, the Blackberry may boast the biggest smartphone market share, and the Windows Mobile platform is, um, around, but it’s Android that’s best for developing apps. Or at least it was the Android developers who best defended their platform at the smartphone smackdown during our Mobile Madness event on Tuesday.
The event was a big success, featuring a look at the future of the mobile industry both locally and globally, a panel of executives dishing on what we can look forward to in the next year, and keynote speakers touching on voice recognition, data storage, and Windows’ share in the smartphone world. More than 200 people crammed into Microsoft’s New England Research & Development Center for the forum. (Check out our slide show here.)
I think the purpose of the smackdown was best summed up in the words of referee John Landry, founder and managing director of Lead Dog Ventures: “The objective here is really to dump on the other platforms.”
To achieve that, we invited developers and others passionate about app creation to step up and represent the iPhone, Google’s Android, BlackBerry, and Windows. The audience decided by a raising of hands that the Android guys did the best job representing their platform. The congratulations goes to Henry Cipolla, chief technology officer of mobile app analysis startup Localytics, and Carter Jernigan, founder of two forty four a.m., makers of the app Locale, which enables phones to automatically change their settings based on locations.
The duo lauded Android’s ability to work with multiple carriers, the openness of the platform’s market, and its ability to run background apps, allowing an app to remain active even when it’s not the primary app being run. Jernigan spoke about how his product could only work with the Android platform because of that unique capability. “If you’re trying to create a business and have a lot of different avenues for success, the Android makes the most sense,” Cipolla said.
This gave the iPhone guys an opportunity to jump in. “Don’t you want to be where the people are?” said Raizlabs‘ Craig Spitzkoff, pointing out the fact that Apple has the highest share of customers downloading and paying for mobile apps.
Cimarron Buser, VP of products and marketing for Apperian, pointed out that when it comes to apps, in the beginning there was the iPhone. “You can already see that every other vendor is looking at the iPhone in terms of technology and business model,” he said.
Other smackdown contenders, and even audience members, pointed out the sense of entitlement this has given the iPhone. They criticized Apple’s tendency to suddenly shelve a mobile app (which it did last month with apps it deemed too sexy) and in turn tank a developer’s business.
Zachariah Hofer-Shall, representing development on the Windows Mobile side, lashed out at what he called the “communist regulations of the App Store.” He and others also brought up
