Wink Saville’s Blog

Last night I attended the Android get together at Google in Mountain View. It was nice to put faces to the people we see on the mailing list. The first hour plus was devoted to Q&A with most of the questions revolved around platform/business questions. Many of the developers, including myself, are worried that the platform will be castrated and fragmented in the way J2ME has been.

As the story goes the developers see platforms (J2ME, Windows Mobile, Symbian) with many types of capabilities but when the reach consumers many things have been removed. The prime example given was SMS; carriers charge per message so when the smart phones come out support other types of messaging isn’t supported. Another example might be ringtones or support for Skype, I’m sure the list could go on and on.

Anyway, the jist of the first hour was that the developers hope that Google will be able to “guarantee” a common set of capabilities that all phones will have. But since the platform is open source and Apache licensed anybody can do whatever they want. The only enforceable approach would be on the branding side. If you want the “Android” brand they you will support these features. I think we all hope the right thing happens.

After the Q&A session everyone huddled in groups around the varous Google people, this included Dan Morrill, Dianne Hackborn, Jason Chen and others whom I didn’t catch there names. In these groups more technical discussions ensued, for myself I talked with Dianne about async-messaging, serialization and networking. No revelations, but it was a good conversation. I was talked with Dan and a couple of developers about wifi and impressed upon them the need to allow peer to peer communication over wifi and allowing applications to source data for the media renderer’s.

I also, gave my business card to various people at Google, I’d like to work more closely with them either as a consultant or possibly an employee, we’ll see. If nothing happens soon on that front then I’m going to have to be look’n for something real soon now to put food on the table.

Cheers,

Wink Saville