Open-sourcing Android actually makes the developer case for it even worse, since it means the platform's going to get even more fragmented - Verizon or somebody will get it in mind to stick one of their godawful let's-put-a-V-in-front-of-everything user interfaces onto Android, strip out half of its libraries / features in the process (either for "security reasons" or because they duplicate something they want to charge people extra for), and still call it an "Android" phone, and people will buy it, discover it can't run Pleco and send me angry e-mails.
There are three basic reasons why it's unlikely you'll see Pleco on Android anytime soon:
Technical - as I've already said, Android currently requires all software to be written in Java, while Pleco is written in C. C is the closest thing the programming world has to a lingua franca - it's a programming language that until the last few years you could pretty much expect every single consumer platform to support; Windows, Mac OS (Classic and X), Linux, Palm, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Symbian, even most recent video game consoles. The user interface still has to be customized for each platform, as do some other OS-dependent areas like file access and audio playback, but you can write a tricky piece of C code to, say, query a flashcard database, and have it run largely unchanged on almost any platform that lets you write in C.
Android, however, does not allow you to write software in C, but only in Java. Unlike RIM/BlackBerry (which also is Java-only, though they used to support C) Google's at least made a decent effort to work around some of Java's limitations, providing for example a version of SQLite that's written in nice fast native code (so you're still accessing it from your written-in-Java program but it at least performs like it would if it were written in C), but nonetheless the use of Java means we'd have to pretty much rewrite all of Pleco from scratch - not just the user interface / platform-specific parts, but everything, even the old and well-tested areas like the character search system and the text compression engine. So it would take several times as much work to port Pleco to Android as it would to port it to iPhone, Symbian, or another C-friendly platform. There's been some talk about Android eventually supporting C development too, but even if they do, a lot of cell carriers will likely disable support for it in their particular Android phones (again for security / anti-competitive reasons), so it seems unlikely that Android C development will ever be commercially viable.
So it's not that Android's difficult to program for, it's that it's difficult for us to program for - someone writing a new Chinese dictionary program from scratch on Android would likely have a much easier time, since they could design everything in an Android-specific way and only add features that it made sense to add on Android, but getting all (or even most) of Pleco ported over to Android would be a tremendous undertaking.
Business - I've said here a few times that porting Pleco from Palm OS to Windows Mobile didn't do much for our sales, and I stand by that - really all the Windows Mobile version has done is gradually take away more and more sales from Palm OS, but our sales haven't grown any faster with us supporting Windows Mobile than they did when we weren't supporting it, and our development costs are obviously a lot higher supporting two platforms instead of one. Pleco isn't a game or tip calculator or some other little application people buy because it happens to run on their phone; if you're enthusiastic enough about a piece of mobile software to shell out $100 for it, it's a pretty small leap from there to also factor it in when deciding which phone to buy.
So we have to look at supporting a new platform more like adding a new feature than opening up a new market for our products - it's something that can potentially win over a decent number of new customers (as we expect the audio / stroke order / new dictionaries / etc to do with 2.0), but going from two platforms to three is not going to mean a 50% jump in sales, and the extra sales from going from Palm/WM/iPhone to Palm/WM/iPhone/Android would be unlikely to even cover the cost of an Android port.
Even with iPhone I don't expect our overall sales to grow that much - people unfamiliar with Pleco flipping through the iTunes store for Chinese dictionary software will notice the $100 price tag, chuckle, and buy the $10 CEDICT-based product right below it instead - but it's popular enough and easy enough to develop for that it's likely to turn at least a small profit even if a lot of the sales are to people who would otherwise have bought the Palm/WM version.
The hardware fragmentation makes it even harder to make money with an Android port - with Windows Mobile and Palm OS you're guaranteed every device will fall within a certain narrow range of form factors / screen sizes / processor speeds / included libraries / etc, and the range with iPhone is narrower still (in fact at the moment it's nonexistent, every iPhone / iPod Touch ever made has the same size screen / same speed processor / same OS features), but with Android there's no such guarantee; many Android phones (particularly low-end / touchscreen-less ones) would likely be unable to run Pleco in any form, and many others likely wouldn't run it very well. And given Android's "openness" is one of the areas Google's touting most aggressively, it's likely you'll see lots and lots of phone designs rather than a few big popular ones - this means more phones for us to support / test on and fewer sales on each one, not to mention the aforementioned angry-people-who-buy-an-Android-phone-but-can't-run-Pleco-on-it.
Personal - regular PlecoForums readers know that running Pleco is something of a labor of love for me, and porting Pleco to another platform (something with which I would have to be intimately involved, as we're way too small for me to just hand it off to a trusted subordinate and not have to worry about it until it's done) really doesn't offer any of the satisfaction that adding new features / refinements does; you're not making a better Chinese dictionary, you spend a year pulling your hair out working around the hundreds of bugs / confusing APIs / other problems on this new platform and at the end of the day all you've got is the exact same thing you had a year ago but running on a slightly different gadget than it was before. So unless there's an overwhelming business case for supporting a new platform, my personal inclination is always going to be to keep Pleco on as few platforms as possible.
Aside from the desktop version (which really is a whole new product in a design / features / sales sense, but happens to share a lot of the licensing / coding work from the handheld version, making it an even more appealing project) my hope is that after iPhone we can pretty much just sit tight with our platform situation for a while; put Pleco 3.0 out on WM/iPhone/Windows/OSX and not support anything else absent a gigantic shift in the market.
