HTC Hero and Joe the Developer

Android fans are all excited about the new Android phone announced by HTC at a press event in London yesterday.

This is a great news for the mobile user, Android platform, and Google the company. The user gets the UI which is superior to the vanilla Android experience. The platform gets a neat twist and a marketing boost, Google gets another chunk of mobile market to throw advertisement against.

What does it mean for an average Android developer?

Trouble.

While I typically don't talk about the widespread Apple mobile product, there's one thing that's great about it. An iPhone developer can be sure their application reaches 100% of the devices and looks exactly the same on every one of them. Not so for Android. With three flavors soon to be found in the wild and potentially different screen resolutions, as showcased by Kogan Agora, a developer faces tough choices. Do I want to support the phones with no Google experience? What my application looks like on a QVGA screen?

Very soon development for Android platform will get more expensive. More expensive than it currently is and possibly more expensive than it is for iPhone. No doubt the top Android development shops will go the extra mile and provide built-in UI optimizations to address the variety. For individual developers the story will likely unfold differently.

Developers who choose to drop some market share and support, say, only Google experience phones will still have to deal with the issue of potentially different screen resolution as, to the best of my knowledge, there is no way of restricting the application from being downloaded to odd or undesirable screen size phones. That means a number of disgruntled users giving bad reviews on something they are not supposed to be using in the first turn.

According to some reports Android will see 900% increase in sales this year. While great for the platform, the figure has a different meaning for an individual developer. Reaching the whole market might be prohibitively expensive. Reaching a fraction of it might not be enough for a sensible business model.

Third party applications is a boon for a mobile platform, fragmentation is a curse. Which one will prevail for Android?