Android is a modern, capable, perhaps even “sexy”, mobile operating system. However, you can say the same thing about iPhone and Palm’s upcoming WebOS. What distinguishes Android from those two is being open source. In theory, Android should be able to add more capabilities more quickly via having more people contributing to its development.
In practice, contributing to Android is far from easy. The simple things (e.g., contributing to documentation) are hard, and the hard things (e.g., overhauling built-in applications like the media player) are byzantine.
Read the rest over in my latest post for NetworkWorld!
