As a developer for Android devices, i must say this article makes me really sad. How can a developer be satisfied with limitations and just put the "but it's how it is to be more secure" stamp on it.<p>Let's see those 2 sentences that make really no sense:
"it can't just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS."
and:
"As a developer, it's a bit sad losing the ability to come up with crazy plugins and daemons and system-level utilities, but I believe it's a tradeoff worth making."<p>I've now owned Android devices since the G1 (the first), now switching to the Nexus One. The nerd i am i probably installed hundreds of those apps, that are not approved by someone. Not one of them did somehow brick my phone! The worst thing that happens is that apps don't do what i want, some even crash (but that's surprisingly rare). But still, they can run in the background, communicate with each other, etc.<p>So, why am i telling this:
If smart engineers can think about what a smartphone OS should be like, it will support save mechanisms for multitasking, for daemons and plugins. Behind Androids Interface are a lot of very neat concepts working.(intents/broadcasts, man, i love that concept!)<p>From what i can tell:<p>- iPhone OS is some stripped down Mac OS version, which probably has its deficits in some areas.  I believe that Apple just doesn't give us multitasking because it has heavy impact on batterylife or security (because the OS wasn't made for mobiles, in the beginning).<p>- When chosing between a _free_ development platform on Java, with Eclipse on every major platform and a subscription based development only with Mac OSX and a language that is basically used nowhere else (Obj-C)... well, the choice is clear for me.
Google did a pretty good job with the Eclipse integration and it's toolchain.