Today we’re somehow in between yesterdays geek fight between Apple and Google over the openess and/or integration of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating system and tonights Apple event.
Developer Joe Hewitt, who for example built the great Firefox Extension Firebug and the first few versions of the great Facebook iPhone App, has now joined in to the discussion via Twitter.
How does Android get away with the “open” claim when the source isn’t public until major releases, and no one outside Google can check in?
Until Android is read/write open, it’s no different than iOS to me. Open source means sharing control with the community, not show and tell.
Check his Twitter stream for all of his statements. So why is this interesting? Well, firstly Joe Hewitt has given up on developing the Facebook iPhone client because of a lack of choice over the whole process, but he didn’t stop working for Facebook and rumors say he’s in charge of developing an official Android client for Facebook. So now he’s equally frustrated with the state of things over at iOS’s biggest rival. We’ll see if any more voices appear but for the time being it seems like the “open claims” of the Android folks didn’t hold for very long and in my personal opinion enduser satisfaction probably ranks higher than having an OS that can be compiled yourself and in this field Apple still holds the crown. I – as a geek – might enjoy hacking my devices and tweaking every little aspect of the platform, but for the average user it’s much more important to find the applications you want to use easily and without much set up effort which is still easier with a unified platform like iOS in contrast to the fragmented multi incarnations of Android on different carriers and handheld platforms.
The first change is a that scrolling now mimics the speed of your swiping on the screen, making longer messages easier to read through. The second change is that the toolbars within Gmail are now locked while you scroll (they used to appear after you were finished scrolling).
