RobRedbeard - very true on #2, since WP7 doesn't allow for the use of unsafe mode.
Once again, though, the fact that your justification for wanting an Android version has to do with an aspect of iPhone (the "indentured servitude") that, to be honest, the vast majority of consumers don't care about worries me about about whether we'd really be growing the size of our potential market much with an Android port. The computer-savvy types who are responsible for most of the posts in this thread are among our best customers, but there simply aren't enough of you to make Pleco successful on your own; people learning Chinese overall are not AFAIK more proficient with technology than the general population, and simply owning a PDA or smartphone is no longer as geeky as it was in the early days of Pleco.
This also hurts the case for a "Pleco Lite" for Android, I guess, since the very same subset of Pleco users who are most interested in an Android port also happens to be the subset that's most interested in the sorts of complex / arcane features that are likely to be the last ones ported over. Given that we've already gone to the trouble of designing / creating those features, I suppose we might want to just accept our "Chinese dictionaries for computer nerds" label and proceed from there, but the time / resources we might put into a "full" Android port could also be put into thoroughly shedding that label on iPhone, maybe even rolling out alternate iPhone products like something with a highly slimmed-down interface that involved just a single purchase and had all of its data files built-in, and/or to developing a desktop or web-based product that might arguably be a better home for those sorts of complicated features anyway.
The fundamental problem is this: while we're selling a lot more copies of our software now, our margins are a lot lower on iPhone than on Palm / WM (hardly a big secret - we're charging less for things and yet paying Apple a 30% commission), and hence we're not seeing the sort of giant leap in our revenues that we might have hoped for with an iPhone version. The low margins are basically a fact of life in the modern smartphone market; consumer unwillingness to pay high prices is if anything an even bigger problem on Android, and I'm not at all confident we could avoid the commissions either if companies like AT&T can get away with blocking non-Market apps with hardly anyone complaining. And the prices we can charge may slip even further as the quality of free / low-cost alternatives continues to improve. Heck, Android's easier inter-app communication makes that even more of a problem than on iPhone; you don't need to build flashcards into your free Chinese dictionary on Android, you just link your dictionary to the free Android version of Anki.
Putting many / most of our resources towards an Android port right now would represent a sort of doubling-down on our current business model, putting the same product you all have loved for years on yet another platform you've temporarily alighted on, continuing to be largely uncontested in the high-end mobile Chinese dictionary market but also continuing to address through that only a very small subset of the overall Chinese learning community. While pretty much every other alternative (even just putting everything towards iPhone improvements) would have more potential to let us branch out, maybe even hit a point size-wise where we'd be able to start working on a bunch of projects (like an Android port) simultaneously. And I'm really not worried about a Pleco-level product appearing on Android on the meantime - a high-end Android Chinese dictionary is an even less promising prospect financially for someone starting from scratch.
If we can overcome the fragmentation concerns, developing an Android version next is probably the safest move, both because it's something we already know there's a market for and because it would protect us against any future mischief from Apple, but that doesn't mean it's the right one, or the one that's best for our users long-term.
mfcb - good points, though a lot of the cool things about the desktop version might unfortunately be difficult to port back to WM (even assuming that WM sales hold up enough post-iPhone-flashcards-and-Windows-Phone-7 to justify it). Going forward, though, particularly if WP7 is less than a slam-dunk I could see Microsoft coming at this problem from another direction and scaling down desktop Windows to work on ever-smaller devices - Intel with Atom is shrinking X86 processors to the point where it almost makes sense to put them into smartphones - so the desktop-doesn't-mean-desktop argument could get even stronger with time.
radioman - that is interesting; haven't seen many people arguing for iPhone's restricted-ness from a corporate IT perspective, but it makes sense. Though at the same time it's quite possible some handset vendor (maybe RIM if they finally give up on their ever-more-outdated-seeming OS) might eventually carve out a nice little niche for themselves selling locked-down, corporate-friendly Android devices; certainly possible to take it in that direction, though given all of the customization involved, those devices definitely wouldn't be getting regular updates to the latest OS versions...
