Today Pocketgamer put up a piece about all the Android phones being trotted out at the Mobile World Congress. Of course, how you feel about Android as a Java developer has a lot to do with what you feel that the relationship between Java and Android is and should be, but the title, “The new Java”, certainly jumped out at me. Only author Ben Griffin didn’t mean it in a good way:But with so many phones coming out in the near future powered by the Android OS, Google is facing the same sort of issues that Java has always faced. For one, there’s hardware fragmentation. With so many different handsets, developing games that utilise both the power of the high end while running on the low end will be a headache for developers. Secondly, there’s the issue of memory: the more technically ambitious games would require more memory, which isn’t always freely available in the existing handsets. The use of SD cards for extra memory compared with Apple’s internal flash memory seems very backward. Android will continue to grow, but the standardisation of the App Store and the iPhone models (as well as the iPad) means developers all drink from the same cup, as it were, which has played a big part in Apple’s success. Android will likely replace Java as a hugely pervasive platform plagued with fragmentation issues and other problems, meaning that Android games will do well in terms of sheer volume but won’t be revolutionary in the way iPhone games have been.People in the industry are still trying to figure out why the iPhone has been so successful, but I think the tight OS-hardware coupling, leading to a platform that’s easy to code for and understand, is probably pretty high on the list. I just wrote a piece for ITworld about Microsoft’s various failed attempts to conquer the mobile space, and I think they too have found it problematic to just ship software and let it be implemented on wildly varying hardware. Mobile Java is at the extreme end of this fragmentation, with so many different profiles implemented over devices of wildly varying quality and capabilities. Of course, you could argue that, from Sun’s (and now Oracle’s) perspective, that fragmentation isn’t really a bad thing: they’re making money from all those Java ME licenses, developers can port their skills from device to device even if they can’t port every line of code, and if there isn’t some coherent “Java platform” that consumers can perceive, well, who cares, really? Not everyone has to rule the world. But I wonder if Google would be able to step back and adopt this attitude about Android, now that they seem to have committed themselves to a battle with Apple for smartphone supremacy. Technology Industry