Developers at the Informal Android Developer Meetup occasionally ask about the future of Android,especially in comparison to iPhone. The latest news shows that Google’s efforts and Android’s open source programming are paying off. Third party counts of the apps on the Android Market peg the number at 50K, which is quite a nice boost from the 40K or so apps on it last month. The iPhone apps still number around 200K, but many of these apps are probably being converted right now.

The number of iPhone devices are three, the iPhone, the iTouch, and the new iPad. Currently, there are 36 devices running Android. Forecasts have said that there will be about 50 Android devices released this year, about 1 a week, which will keep Android developers busy. 

The future of Android looks bright. I have always thought of iPhone as a cell phone on training wheels. It taught people, especially Americans, how to use a smartphone and the potential that smartphones had. Now that people are familiar with smartphones, they can graduate to more advanced smartphones that fit their personalities. We are seeing the past playing out again. Like the PC vs. Mac arguments, the open nature of the Android OS will result in a large number of devices that have a wide range of capabilites and prices. The closed nature of the iPhone will result in a beautiful, well-thought out device that is extremely expensive compared to others and slowly adds new features.

A Japanese blogger who goes by Nobi shared his views on whether Apple’s iPhone is a success or not in Japan.  He was too polite to say so directly but comparing Apple’s marketing to George W. Bush’s policies sounds pretty negative.

Fierce Developer posted an interesting piece on another blog’s post. Specifically, a professional iPhone developer crunched the numbers on how much money was involved in putting together a really complex iPhone app and determined that it was completely unworkable with the $0.99 apps crowding out the expensive apps. With over 10,000 apps now, the store is already pretty crowded.

I look at this development as just another software cycle in the life of a new platform. After all, the apps are becoming more complicated because the software and interfaces are getting easier to program and to interface. At the same time the market is growing. These complex programs that require several manhours and $100,000 would have required several times the effort and money just a couple of years ago. They would have been almost impossible to get enough of a market to make the development worth the cost.

Even today in the life of the PC, free software is everywhere, but people still buy complex, expensive software when it is justified by the price and usefulness. After all, Oracle sells multimillion dollar databases even though there are many high quality free database easily available.

In a related story, the iPhone apps store was just about the only site that actively advertised that you could get iPhone apps at their store. Oh, sure. There were sites where jailbroken phones could get apps, but those don’t count. Now the monopoly has been shaken by Mobile Distillery, which is heavily promoting their site to developers. But will they come?

The mobile industry has never been so hot. Forst, Apple announces quietly that users have downloaded 300 million apps among the 10,000 apps available on the iPhone Apps store. Apple is also pushing the iPhone in new sales channels, specifically WalMart, which may be the only retailer on the planet to have increased sales during the downturn.

Their competitor, Google’s Android, is getting more allies in their fight. Sony Ericson will be building Android phones after initially refusing to join Google’s mobile push. Sony is still part of the community that will be working on Nokia’s Symbian platform, which is in the process of being open sourced. But there has been little good news from Nokia lately. We will see if the revamped Symbian can compete with the brand new iPhone and Android platforms.

Last night, I attended my first Google Android Developer Meetup. The month before, I attended my first iPhone Developer Meetup. With this tiny sample, I am more than qualified to start issuing unproven generalities.

The iPhone meetups have been going on for several months and have a large number of developers. The Android meetup is only two months old and had about 2 dozen developers. The iPhone crowd was mainly people looking to make money on the iPhone, either for themselves or for their company. The Android meetup was primarily attended by people programming Android as a hobby and out of curiosity. But the biggest difference of all: just about everyone at the iPhone meetup owned an iPhone or iTouch while only three people at the Android meetup owned a Google phone.

One of the more interesting statements for why the developers had not bought a Google phone yet was that the Android programming test tools included an excellent simulator while the iPhone simulator almost required a developer to buy a real iPhone to test their applications. But the other reason that the Google phones were not purchased yet is that developers have already bought the iPhone, in addition to the phone that they already owned, and just did not see any big reason to buy another phone.