Apparently it has been announced that Android based web traffic is greater than iPhone. Now that doesn't mean Android is better than iPhone, or even that there are more Android phones or anything, simply that Android users are consuming more web bandwidth. But, this comes at an interesting time for me given that recently i have been doing more and more phone dev work, and Android is by far my platform of choice.

In theory I should like blackberry because they let you make apps with HTML and CSS, I can do those with my eyes shut, but oh my, Blackberry has truly dire documentation. What is wrong with this company? I mean seriously, watch "Introduction to Web Development", apparently from March 17, 2010. Oh my! How long since I've had anyone tell me about things like page weights. Sure, I get they matter more on phones that modern broadband, but some of us learnt web dev back on 56k dial-up! (And yes, I think that makes me late to the party, 14.4k web devs get the respect due to old age.) And as for the audio, oh my. Was that really recorded this year? The man sounds like he's sitting in a tin can or something, the umms and errs are fine if I'm watching someone on YouTube teaching me something they figured out at home, but not a multinational like RIM. Their website is a dated "one question per page" type thing, which maybe works fine on Blackberry products but let's assume that blackberry devs will be sitting at a Windows PC since that seems to be the only OS you support for the whole stack.

Now we get to iPhone. Apple have done the opposite to Blackberry by not only offering dev tools for Macs, but by insisting they only work on a Mac! I guess you can use Parrallells or something, but don't imagine developing for more than one phone will be easy. Apple also ask $99/year before they even let you download the tools. Not much chance to see how comfortable you are writing for iPhones then; just invest in a Mac and an account, and when you're a few hundred in hope it works for you.

Which brings us to Android, who have a few bugs in their tutorials and a mailing list which seems to take days for moderator approval. BUT! They have tutorials. They have a dev platform I can download on any computer. I don't have to invest anything but some disk space and time in learning Android. You install a single emulator and can play with all kind of wonderful phone versions (yes, it struggles to load at times but it does load).

So my theory is that Android is going to keep growing, if for no other reason than it's without a shadow of a doubt the easiest platform for a new developer to do anything on.