Nowadays electronic gadgets are so pervasive. I have iPhone, iPad, multiple laptops and desktops at home. Recently I got a Nexus 7 tablet, my first Android device. What really impressed me is its easiness of development process.
Apple products are cool, no doubt about it. But you have to have a physical Mac machine to work on iOS/Mac apps. In addition you need to register the developer license which cost $99/year. Apple defines quite a bit of restriction and rules to mark sure they have full control of the Apple nation. Apple's main focus is user experience, not much for developers. Many people claim Object C and XCode the worst development environment comparing with other popular languages and IDE in the market. However, due to Apple's huge crowd of so called high-end and loyal customers, more and more developers are joining this not so friendly platform.
On the other hand, Windows phone as a late-catch-up follower, surprisingly, still requires the same $99/year fee too. With registration done, you need to install the commercial Visual Studio IDE, Windows phone SDK and that notorious Zune package to develop a simple app to run on a Windows phone handset. Should they have made all free on the first day when realizing they were way behind Apple and Google? I love C# and .NET, but I feel sad about those dump decisions made by Microsoft.
In the Android world things are very different. You only need to pay one-time $25 registration fee to publish your app to the public. It's totally free for you to do any coding experience on your own Android devices. Unlike proprietary object C and C#, you will use Java and eclipse to program the Android apps. Java is the most used object-oriented programming language (source from Tiobe) in the past few years, and open-source eclipse is a popular IDE for many programming languages for years. All Java developers would easily switch to Android development.
Yesterday I downloaded the free Android SDK, unzipped it (no need to install anything), and I was able to open eclipse IDE to create a new Android project. After installed the USB driver for Nexus 7 I could connect the tablet to my development machine using USB cable, within 30 minutes, my first "Hello World" Android app was running in the Nexus 7. The only problem I had was the Android emulator which is super slow and basically useless. But running and debugging the code via a physical device is easy and fast.
Android devices become so popular in just a few years. Will Android rules the mobile world as Microsoft dominates PC world in the past 30 years? No one knows, but people like Android for reasons. From a developer point of view, it's free, open and easy to work with. All that is a nice invitation to developers to join the Android world.
