Giraffe said:
I'm seriously disappointed with Skritter's position on Android development which is basically that they don't care that Flash (and the ability to run Skritter) is fast disappearing. Apparently their only priority is iOS and the "desktop" browser. I can sympathize with the challenges of supporting multiple platforms but, as an end user who carefully chose his mobile platform based on market share and openness, it doesn't please me at all. They also don't seem to be in a hurry to fix the major bugs in their Flash implementation.
I'd love to see an Android competitor.
It's just not worth developing our own Skritter knockoff for the sake of Android alone - Skritter already has the algorithms and the data, not to mention their excellent website, and we would need to come up with all of those things from scratch in order to have something competitive. And anywhere other than Android we'd have to deal with Skritter as a fierce and well-established competitor, not to mention the fact that I imagine they'd be much less interested in data sharing between our apps if we were actively trying to destroy them.
Plus, they're smart guys and I have to assume that they have good reason not to port to Android - I'm not privvy to any of their internal financial / subscriber / etc numbers, of course, but I imagine they've looked closely at metrics like how many Android users visit their website, how many people have signed up to their service as a result of the iPhone app (as opposed to their existing subscribers for whom it was just a lovely but non-revenue-generating bonus), how much email they get about this compared to the amount they were getting about an iPhone version, etc, and concluded on the basis of those that an Android port wouldn't be a good business move for them. Which is not to say that they're necessarily right, but it's not really a vote in favor of trying an Android stroke practice app ourselves.
Though on a not-quite-related note, I've been playing around with a new pressure-sensitive Bluetooth 4.0 stylus for my iPad a bit (certainly not something confined to iPad, they've got them on Android too) and I'm wondering whether there might be some potential for somebody to make a calligraphy practice app using it: not really something that's trying to actually teach you characters / words like Skritter does, but just something that's trying to teach you to write properly. Pick a few hundred common / calligraphically-important characters, make a really awesome paintbrush-simulating drawing pad (or heck, license code from one of the existing drawing apps - they'd probably be happy for the extra money as long as it didn't compete with them) and let people practice over and over again, first with a professionally-drawn character as the background, then next to it, then blind (checking against the character afterwords). Bonus points for actually analyzing the character shape and commenting on areas for improvement, though that would obviously be a lot harder.