Recently Joe Hewitt, the iPhone Facebook app developer, made news with tweets about his frustrations with Android development. While he does refer to Android as “really flexible, agnostic, and developer-friendly” he also says it’s “really sloppily designed” , “Android tools are horrendous” and the “OS is hideous”. He clarified in a later tweet that he didn’t say “on technical merits Android is great.” With that blitz of quotes, I’ll summarize for clarity: He basically feels that the OS is good, but visually ugly. He also feels that the open source tool, Eclipse, is “horrendous“.

He also complains about the fragmentation of the market, which is a serious concern for some developers. He suggests the Android dev community “needs a quirksmode.org-like site to chart the subtle differences between each device.” I wonder, what “subtle differences” would he need to be concerned about with the Facebook app it’s been said he’s working on? It’s a Facebook app…

Yes fragmentation is a real concern, and with new phones still coming out running Android 1.5, it will continue to be a problem for years. But this has been an issue with PCs and browsers for years, yet developers can consistently deliver outstanding applications. I do believe that one area it could hurt, is game development. With games, programmers have to more concerned with getting as much as they can out of a piece of hardware. When their customers could be running on such a wide range of devices, they have to hit a common denominator or make the game more flexible with performance settings (like PC games). But as more and more Androids drop into more and more hands, game development shops will choose to deal with the support and dev issues and grab a piece of that pie.

To a tweet stating “If Android’s still fragmented and incompatible in 1 year, it’s dead except as a cheap ‘featurephone’ OS.“, Hewitt replied “I would agreed with you but the problem certainly isn’t hurting sales now.”

I would say that sales now count for a lot. Manufacturers will see the skyrocketing sales of their new phones driven by this cost effective OS and turn around and crank out new devices. And devs will continue to make apps if millions of people have them. 1 year is a ridiculous time frame for this. Today’s sales means tomorrow sees new Android phones released. They’re here to stay for quite a while and devs will be where the customers are.

Now Google, please fix that silly Android Market to handle the rush of apps that are sure to come!