I can't think that there can be many neutral bystanders in this battle between these two behemoths of the Mobile Internet; Apple and Google. But those of us that think we are still enjoy anything that one company does which might challenge the dominance of the other.
Witness the iPhone antenna flaw coming so soon after the triumph of the release of the iPhone 4. A product which seemed to raise the bar still further for anyone trying to compete with Apple in industrial design. Everyone, other than people in Apple, must have been secretly smiling that this gave one glimmer of hope to competitors that Apple were not perfect. They were in fact just human.
This brings me to the point of this post which is something non-human, Android in fact. And it isn't a consumer product in the conventional sense at all, but it may be, just may be a defining strategy which will shape the future of this battle.
The strategy comes in the form of the Android App Inventor. This is a simple point-and-click tool for creating applications for an Android handset. It is apparent that the tool has been created to enable students to create mobile applications. The product is quite clearly educational in its approach and there are a number of teachers and professors that are using the application to teach computer science.
Now two things spring to mind when I use the App Inventor.
The first is that it is a very smart idea to get students using your products. Today's students are tomorrows employees and eventually they will have some influence over what their employer does. I remember seeing row and rows of SUN SPARC stations in Sheffield University when I was studying Software Engineering. The one thing I knew was that I wanted to work on one of these once I had a real job. If everyone undertaking computer science courses in schools and colleges is learning how to programme for Android devices, then you have a ready made bias entering the workforce.
The second thing about the App Inventor which gets me excited is that it is such a simple intuitive programming interface that you just want to go back and use it more and more. What was the last software tool that got me this excited? Visual Basic. I was lucky enough to use this tool in 1991, it was the dawn of the IDE (integrated development environment), where your programming was within the development tool. Visual Basic let me prototype windows applications and then just continue and build them. So what if it was interpreted code, the code was BASIC and it wasn't as fast as 'C'. I'd created something while you were discussing a budget, and it worked. It wasn't just me that loved Visual Basic (my previous programming language was BCPL, so I had an excuse!), it was just about everyone. Corporates loved it because they could do something useful quickly and save a fortune. Individuals loved it because they could solve a problem with an application and create a business. In fact Dialogue was created out of PageMail an SMS application written in Visual Basic version 3 which had at least 1 million customers.
So anyone that can provide a tool which enables others to innovate and rise above their own personal or business challenges, is onto a winner. One might even observe that Visual Basic was in part responsible for the success of Windows and Microsoft over Apple over fifteen years ago.
I'm not saying that App Inventor is there yet. It lacks a fair bit of what many of us would expect from a serious tool, but I'd say that the folk behind this product have done the hard part, they've created the environment, the 'Lego-like' building blocks and the other components. Adding a few more libraries and creating a way of deploying the results into the Android Market seems to be a relatively small job, and one which probably is the subject of a fair be of internal wrangling.
If the result of the early trials of the App Inventor are good and the people of Google and Android feel that their commercial purposes are well served by opening up this product to the world at large, then I think it is 'game on' for Google in terms of giving Apple a challenger which is coming at the same problem from another angle. Surely Apple will see this coming and not repeat the history of the 1990s where people loved to use Apple Macs but ended up buying into Windows because of the applications and developer support. Well lets see!
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