daniel123 - I'm sorry the timing has worked out so badly in your case; if you think that's disappointing, though, imagine how we felt when Palm announced webOS / discontinued old-school Palm OS about 2 months after we released Pleco 2.0
mfcb - I think Microsoft still sees the value in old-school WM for enterprise apps; as I said in another thread, a doctor friend of mine still carries around a 2003-vintage iPAQ because her hospital's billing system uses an old-school Windows Mobile app. In cases like that, it's often much cheaper to keep buying extra hardware to run that one mission-critical application than it is to shell out for custom development on a brand new app for another platform. So there'll likely still be some WM hardware kicking around for a while. (heck, Acceca's about to release two new Palm OS handhelds for those users, the MEZ1500 and the PDA32)
westmeadboy - sideloading means installing non-approved apps, the whole point of jailbreaking on iPhone and the main reason why Android gets to claim to be more "open" than iPhone. Unfortunately, though, since Android is open-source, manufacturers and carriers can easily choose to turn sideloading off, and per that article character linked to, it seems like Motorola and AT&T are already doing so; it's quite conceivable that in the future a large portion of the Android phones in circulation might be just as locked-down as iPhones.
Except now we might have more than one app store to deal with, with each one imposing its own separate set of arbitrary restrictions / irrational reasons for rejecting apps / etc; we could be dealing with a dozen Apples, having to make custom builds for each and perhaps even coming up with different pricing / distribution methods depending on the market; for example, one market might allow in-app purchases while another one wouldn't, one might charge a 50% commission instead of 30%, etc.
App store fragmentation isn't going to originate with some random startup, it'll be a cell carrier deciding they want to take control for themselves over what apps are allowed to run on the phones they sell, and get a larger cut of the sales in the process; China Mobile's a top candidate for that, actually. Once one of them gets away with it, the rest will all pile in - maybe a few set up some sort of unified submission / approval process, but it still means several Mercurial App Approval Teams to deal with instead of just one.
On the development side of things, we're already seeing fragmentation in terms of which OS versions run on which hardware - I just saw a new announcement *today* of a new phone running Android 1.6. If manufacturers are maintaining their own private Android forks and only occasionally porting over new features from newer OS versions, it's inevitable the development situation will get more and more fragmented. And as you say yourself, Pleco is considerably more complicated than the apps you've developed, so just because you haven't had a problem juggling different configurations doesn't mean that we wouldn't; there are certainly lots of reports out there of certain apps / games failing to run correctly on some Android devices.
iPhone developers don't have to rewrite their apps to make them run on iPad; absent a rewrite, the apps will run with their interfaces scaled up, just as your Android application runs on the Archos tablet. However, because the iPad is expected to sell millions and millions of units, developers are choosing to take the time to redesign their interfaces to make use of all of that extra screen space. However miraculous the Android's screen-scaling algorithm may be, there's no way it can automatically redesign a 4-inch app to take full advantage of a 9-inch screen, all it can really do is scale. And every iPhone / iPod ever made can be updated to iPhone OS 3.0, while it's highly doubtful we'll see that sort of ubiquity for Android 2.0.
On the "screwing you over" front, Apple has never rejected anything we've submitted, they've never so much as sent us an email asking us to change something in the next version, and they consistently pay us twice as fast as they're contractually obligated to. On the other hand, by running AdWords ads on pirate message boards (and refusing to pull them when informed of this), Google is basically paying hackers to help people steal from us. So from my perspective, we've never been screwed over by Apple, and even as I write this we're being screwed over by Google. And were just screwed over by Microsoft a few weeks ago, and by Palm in early '09.
The only way we can really avoid being subject to the various whims of mobile platform makers is to develop a web-based version, and every time I float that idea here it seems like the overwhelming majority of people are against it, including many of the same people who are pushing an Android version. Absent that, we're always going to be in a position where one or two decisions made in a boardroom somewhere can have a devastating effect on our business.
So yes, working with Apple is risky, but Android could be just as risky - if the sideloading option does indeed go away, then even if we don't end up with Android app store fragmentation, getting pulled from Android Market might represent just as big a concern as getting pulled from iTunes is now. And if the markets do get fragmented, their small size might actually make strange app removals *more* likely, since there wouldn't be the sort of widespread blog / press outrage that comes up every time Apple pulls a bunch of apps. That may be the best protection we have against Apple misbehavior, actually - the last time a largely-unobjectionable dictionary app (Ninjawords) was rejected, an Apple VP had to personally respond to the criticism that resulted, and the app, once approved, vaulted to the top of the charts in iTunes thanks to all of the extra press.
Zeldor - Android has its own bugs / security problems, doesn't seem to beat out iPhone in price except in crappy low-end units, and is on the verge of becoming just as closed as iPhone if Motorola and AT&T have their way. I can accept the idea that it's a *comparable* platform from many users' perspectives, but I don't believe it's a *superior* one for most people.
