Android will not be write once, run anywhere, says mobile developer

Someone once called Dave Rensin, now the CEO of Reality Mobile, the foremost expert in mobile APIs. Rensin began his career developing applications that would carry “sensitive” data over wired and wireless networks for the U.S. Army, the Treasury Department and the Secret Service.

FYI: Reality Mobile is a very cool application that transmits video and other data in real time whereever cell coverage is avaialbe. It requires no custmized hardware or infrastructure.

I’ve interviewed Rensin in the past when he proclaimed that WAP is dead.

I thought he would be the perfect person to ask about Android and whether or not it could truly be the first write once, run many mobile software development platform.

To put it bluntly, Rensin, like the other experts I spoke to is very skeptical. His opinion, carries a great deal of weight with me because he and his staff have “been playing with the Android SDK” for a while now.

As to the claim of write once, run anywhere, Rensin calls it “a bit of hyperbole.”

There is no mobile API that works that way, Rensin notes, saying that even a plain generic J2ME code runs differently on different phones.

True, some of that is due to the use of third party VMs, but, like the other experts, Rensin adds, “most of it is owing to the great variety of hardware spec that exist across the phone space.”

Rensin goes one better than that by telling me that Mobile Reality works with the “complete lineup” of HTC phones, a company that says they will be manufacturing Android handsets, and that “the sheer volume of SKUs they [HTC] support leads to minor incompatibilities across them.”

Rensin pretty much guarantees that more demanding applications will have to be tweaked from model to model.

As an example, a camera driver code isn’t the same from device to device. So when an application has to use the camera the application has to know which specific model it is running on.

This, “even though they may all be Windows Mobile Smartphone Edition and come from the same manufacturer,” Rensin told me.

Now that is just one example of where the whole write once, run anywhere concept falls down.

Rensin gives credit to Google saying they do have a collection of really smart people doing innovative things but at the end of the day he says it is unlikely they will completely succeed.

“This is their first foray into the mobile space and there simply isn’t the same kind of platform homogeneity across phones as there is across PCs. Like Palm, or Apple, or Microsoft, it’ll take them a few tries to get it right and even then there will still be tweaking from device to device – it’s inevitable.”