If Google’s Rich Miner was a developer, he’d be coding for the iPhone; however, he’s actually Group Manager for Mobile Platforms, and as such is more interested in boosting Android’s profile with confident predictions that handsets based on the platform will wildly outsell Apple’s cellphone.
“Once you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there’s a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone. [Apple is] a single manufacturer, it’s targeted at a particular demographic, and it falls far short of the 1 billion mobile phones sold every year worldwide” Rich Miner, Google
“There are things I saw people doing with the first version of the Android SDK that it seems like you can’t do with the iPhone at least at the moment” Rich Miner, Google
Strong words, you could say, from a company yet to ship a single handset to a consumer; last month, Google revealed that the Android SDK had been downloaded 750,000 times since its November launch. Apple’s iPhone SDK was downloaded 100,000 times in its first four days of availability.
According to Miner, of the four main handset manufacturers signed up to Android – Motorola, LG, Samsung and HTC – one is expected to reach the market with a device before the others; industry sources suggest that will be a smartphone variant from HTC.
Still, after roundly critiquing the iPhone’s sales, sales potential and the capacity of its SDK, Miner saved some love for last:
“It’s not a competitive thing — it’s great that people are finally building tools so all of these third-party applications can be built and get out there. If I were a developer] I’d certainly be looking at the iPhone, and if you believe there will be lots of Android phones out there, as we do, I’d be developing for both platforms” Rich Miner, Google
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