Gartner also has Symbian still ruling the market in 2012. Two things wrong with that: first off, I don't think that'll be the case, and second, Symbian's also on top now but that doesn't make it a good platform to write software for: very few people are making money writing Symbian apps, and most of the phones running it are really more in the vein of "feature phones" than actual smartphones (whatever the report may say). So that calls into question whether Android will likewise be successful-but-not-so-good-for-third-party-developers; I've read a number of reports that people with software for both Android and iPhone are seeing only a tiny fraction as many sales on Android as they are on iPhone. Plus, Gartner seems to be hedging their bets by predicting that Android / iPhone / WM / BlackBerry will all be within two percentage points of each other; I have a hard time imaging the market will really shake out that evenly.
But beyond that, on the issue of Android in general: we've just spent about a year developing an iPhone version of Pleco, and it's still not out yet (though it's getting extremely close). During that time, we've only managed to make a few modest improvements to our existing software; most of our time has been spent simply reimplementing the same things we already had working perfectly well on other platforms on iPhone. And an Android port would almost certainly be more complicated than an iPhone one on account of the need for Java/C crossovers. So if we started working on an Android port right now, I don't think it'd be ready until well into 2011, and between now and then we'd again be neglecting our existing software as far as adding new features / new types of add-on content / etc.
If the iPhone version takes us up into the stratosphere money-wise, either directly by tripling / quadrupling our sales or indirectly by attracting a whole bunch of VC money (something I'm finally about ready to concede the virtues of), then an Android port might make sense - we could be working on that at the same time as 2 or 3 other big things. Absent that, though, the only way I can see us developing a native Android version is if our backs are against the wall - i.e., if people start to lose interest in iPhone as they have in Palm OS / Windows Mobile. Otherwise, I'd rather spend our limited resources / time on adding new features to our existing products. (and for purposes of this discussion I consider a desktop product to be a "new feature" since it makes possible all sorts of capabilities we haven't had before, not to mention taking probably only a few months to port from our existing Windows Mobile / iPhone OS versions)
A web-based product that runs on Android is a possibility, though, and while I disagree with some aspects of their design / interface, I've been heartened by the success of Skritter as a web-only Chinese learning app; launching a web-based version of Pleco would finally put all of these "when will you support X" discussions to bed, along with being considerably easier than a native Android port (aside from the licensing / business issues).
