I love Scoble.  I really do.  He’s a great source of content, and occasionally controversy.  In a post today, he suggests that developers should build for Android tablets.  I am left a little confused as to his overall logic train, so let’s poke at a few of his points.

The Bar is Low

Really?  The last time I checked, developers were not the types who wanted to walk into a room barely filled with mediocre people and declare themselves the best.  The lure of trying to unseat Angry Birds is a strong siren song.  Using Robert’s logic, the ones who couldn’t cut it are currently developing for Android tablets, so you should go hang out with them.

Crowds = Death

This is fairly well reasoned notion.  Having to deal with immediate scale is killer.  Robert is pointing to the Twitterati as the arbiters of a developer’s success.  What he doesn’t take into account is that editorial selection from the AppStore tribunal would result in a similar challenge to scale.

Hard Earned Dollars Results in Scrapiness

This is a true statement.  However, the uber point is lost in his analysis.  Android is a more difficult platform on which to monetize.  No amount of scrapiness is going to overcome flawed platform decisions.  You can be pretty scrappy when you are making no money on a platform designed to enable marketplace transactions too, and you have the benefit of knowing that as you succeed, the dollars are a result of your actions, and not failings on the part of the platform provider.

Build Unique Stuff

That’s an interesting statement.  I am sure it’s true to some extent, but most developers are looking for interesting scenarios to that lead to sales, not gee whiz factor.

Define Google’s Marketing

One of the core principles of our team is to make sure we are 100% focused on the success of the developers.  We give them whatever they need to be successful, and engage with them wherever we can to find out what we can be doing better.  Robert is making a suggestion that Google is going to reach out to the dev community for help in this regard.  Unless he has inside knowledge, I haven’t seen this actually occurring in the market.  He does make one very good point – Google hasn’t figured out how it will sell its tablet.  The same can be said for the how they promote developers on their platform.

Access to Lacking Features

See point above about unique stuff.  I am confused.  Using widgets + getting on Oprah means your app is more polished than Flipboard?  That’s a damn polished app.  I am not sure widgets would make it more so.  Notifications certainly enable an entirely new way to interact with customers – we’ve got them on Windows Phone 7 and devs are making some cool uses of them.

“Smooth” is Harder

I get that if you figure out how to optimize on the platform, and figure out all kinds of neat tricks, you will be a better programmer.  Totally agree.  You know what else makes you a great programmer?  Getting to focus on your algorithms and overall experience, and not dealing with ridiculous, time consuming, soul sapping optimizations which shouldn’t have to be discovered in the first place.  Developers universally tell us that they love working with the Windows Phone Developer Tools because of the maturity of the tools, the smoothness of the UI, and the ability to focus on the experience, and not nonsense.  You shouldn’t need an additional toolkit for dealing with fragmentation.

Get Noticed

I don’t buy this.  I am not likely to pay more attention because someone has something I don’t.  It may work for the first 2 people to come up to me with a Xoom, but after that, it won’t.  At SxSW, this will not be the case.  Too many plugged in people.  Getting noticed is about having something of value, or being able to cut through the clutter.  Having a Xoom is not a marketing strategy.  Being awesome is.

Fandroids

The fans matter.  Absolutely.  Do they have influence?  That’s the question.  There’s quite a lot of fans of the WebOS as well.  Getting more people to yell into the Techcrunch/Scoble echo chamber is not a marketing strategy.  It’s simply not.  Robert highlights the very difficult part of being a mobile app developer: getting noticed.  The fan boys are fine for an initial early adopter push, but to really get noticed, there’s a much larger problem to be solved.  What is the “backrub algorithm” equivalent for apps?  That’s a post for another time, but the company that figures that out is going to be unbelievably wealthy.

Iterate Faster

Being able to publish faster into a broken marketplace is not a suitable replacement for a broken marketplace experience.  There’s a reason Robert pointed out that people are having a hard time monetizing on Android.

At the end of the day, developers want sockets.  Android tablets will lag iPad for some time in that regard.  As they will also lag iPhone/iPod Touch and Android handsets.  Android hasn’t clearly demonstrated you can make money on their platform when they are supposedly activating 300,000 handsets a day, what makes Robert think that targeting a smaller target market (Android tablets) is a more viable alternative when the underlying marketplace flaws around monetization remain?  That’s not to say developers aren’t making money on Android.  It’s just not as easy as other alternatives in the market.

There was a story which surfaced yesterday about vulnerabilities exposed in a wide swath of Android apps.  SMobile Systems conducted research in the Android app space and found that some 20% of the apps allow third-party apps to gain access to sensitive or private information.

It would be easy to dismiss this article by pointing out that by simply downloading an app, a customer is making a explicit allowance to an app to access data on the phone.  What I found troubling about the findings wasn’t necessarily the point about access to the data, but rather that, 5% of the apps surveyed could make calls and 2% could send premium SMS messages.  Talk about a surprise cell phone bill.

The key word in the above statements, however, is “could.’”  Yes, customers make the decision to download those apps, but they have no way of knowing with certainty what those apps are doing behind the scenes.  UPDATE: Ben points out below that the customer us warned of all the APIs used, which is true, but they aren’t told *how* they are used.

Further, because of the multi-tasking architecture of Android, the apps have the potential to be doing a bunch of bad things in the background when the phone is not in use.

Google has been quick to point out that the architecture of Android would limit what actual damage one of these apps could do, but that’s really not the point.  What is being lost in this discussion is that there is no curation of the Android marketplace.  For all the grumbling and grousing about the Apple AppStore, their review process would likely catch these abuses.  There is no such level of certification for the Android marketplace.  Customers don’t want to think about needing anti-spyware software for their phone, as the article implies is one solution for Android.

The Windows Phone Marketplace certainly believes in the curation model, and we have placed user security as a top priority.  This is one of the main reasons that we have our app certification process, and why (UDPATE: “at least in version 1”) apps are run in sandboxes, with no access to any data other than its own isolated storage, or the ability to communicate with other apps.  UPDATE: The goal is to ensure that absolute best customer experience when using their phone.

UDPATE 6/25/10

I’m not one who believes in conspiracy theories or anything, but I do find the timing of this announcement from Google that they can remotely wipe apps from phones a bit curious.  I have to go do some digging, but I’d be interested to know if the Android developer agreement has specificity about what would constitute grounds for a remote wipe.