Thursday, October 1, 2009

iPhone or Android? Place your bets!



Apple just bought Placebase, the private label mapping company behind Policy Maps. This is yet another indication that Apple and Google, once united against Microsoft, have begun to creep apart.

As a small team of fledgling iPhone app developers, this leads me to wonder whether to bet on Apple's iPhone or Google's Android as the main platform for our wares. Google is ultra-capitalized, but Apple knows hardware, and the company has been around almost as long as Microsoft. While the iPhone owns the smart-phone mindshare now, Google is making steady, quiet inroads, just as it has always done- with search, with advertising, with Gmail, with Google Maps, with Google Docs, and more. It's hard to bet against either one.

The futurist in me wants to bet on Google. But the iPhone is just so damn sexy! How can anyone resist it? *sigh...* I'm going with Apple, for now.

Any takers?

2 comments:

  1. The biggest weakness of the iPhone offering now is the expensive ATT plan. As nice as it is, it is out of the price range for many. Kodak has taken up this ground in the inkjet market with their ESP printers, offering a good and inexpensive printer with the lowest consumable costs. With the right hardware, Andriod could quickly become a player if they take up this ground.

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  2. Agreed. I think any mobile app developer needs to have a parallel dev path for Android, or a port at the ready.

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