What Will Drive Android Adoption?

Android is targeted primarily at developers, with Google and the OHA betting that the way to deliver better mobile software to consumers is by making it easier for developers to write it themselves.

As a development platform, Android is powerful and intuitive, letting developers who have never pro-grammed for mobile devices create useful applications quickly and easily. It’s easy to see how innova-tive Android applications could create demand for the devices necessary to run them, particularly if developers write applications for Android because they can’t write them for other platforms.

Open access to the nuts and bolts of the underlying system is what’s always driven software develop-ment and platform adoption. The Internet’s inherent openness and neutrality have seen it become the platform for a multi-billion-dollar industry within 10 years of its inception. Before that, it was open sys-tems like Linux and the powerful APIs provided as part of the Windows operating system that enabled the explosion in personal computers and the movement of computer programming from the arcane to the mainstream.

This openness and power ensure that anyone with the inclination can bring a vision to life at minimal cost. So far, that’s not been the case for mobile phones, and that’s why there are so few good mobile phone applications and fewer still available for free.

Corporations will also be attracted to Android for the level of control it offers. By using a popular enter-prise programming language in Java, no licensing fees, and offering the level of access and control users demand, Android offers an excellent enterprise platform.