JimmyTheSaint said:
And Samsung currently has the most promising hardware options out there, seeing as how Apple appears committed strictly to the one-handed form factor. With Samsung, I've put my money where my mouth is. I can see wanting to follow them into a different operating system.
I find it extremely unlikely that Samsung would switch to Windows Phone; they want to be like Apple - want their own app store (already pushing it pretty aggressively to developers), lots of proprietary features / APIs, etc - and Microsoft's strictness regarding Windows Phone fragmentation gives them few opportunities for that sort of differentiation. The Galaxy Note would not have happened on Windows Phone unless Microsoft had come up with the idea first. Plus, given Microsoft's friendliness with Nokia (which I'd say has at least a 50% chance of turning into an acquisition within the next year or two) I don't think that switch is likely to make them feel much safer than they do with Google buying Motorola. And it would be a difficult transition - carry both OSes and risk massive consumer confusion, or switch and see mass defection to other manufacturers by Android lovers.
More likely they'll go the Amazon route and start forking Android more aggressively - they're pretty far along on that already, all they really need to do is stop including Android Market on their phones and just about every Android developer will immediately want to list their app in the Samsung store. Samsung has the resources to continue Android development independent of Google (in fact, given what a UI trainwreck Android 4.0 is they might even outdo them), and they'd stand a darn good chance of making their version of it more popular than the Google one - they'd control their own destiny like Apple while still maintaining access to the same massive base of Android apps.
If Google reacted by requiring apps to list exclusively in Android Market, the whole thing could fall apart and manufacturer stores could become the dominant mode of Android app distribution - heck, Samsungs are so dominant among our customers (particularly the ones who actually buy add-ons) that if we had to choose between only supporting Samsungs or not supporting them but supporting every other Android manufacturer's phones, there's a strong chance we'd choose the former.
As far as Windows 8, though, we really can't afford to support more than two platforms (even that many has proven to be a stretch), so we'd only consider a Windows version of Pleco if we discontinued the iOS or Android one. Which doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon - even if Microsoft miraculously manages to carve out a respectable chunk of the market, iOS and Android aren't going to simply vanish anytime soon, and iOS customers have a proven willingness to spend money on apps that other platforms' users simply don't (we currently make 3x as much on iOS with its 24% market share as we do off of Android with its 51% share, and that seems to be a fairly typical ratio for other mobile developers too).