@petkow
I hate the iPhone, so I was not justifying it - that were just general thoughts on apps and are rather related to my experience after three months with Android. I totally agree with you regarding the lack of Flash and the need to completley rebuild apps for a so much bigger screen. Of course this isolation of moble platforms through apps is nonsense and contradicts decades of the development of the WWW. Actually I always expected Java support to advance on handsets and so platform-independant apps to be available.
@wco81
Flash is perfect for touchscreens. Actually the whole UI of some phones (e.g. the LG KU990 Viewty and a lot of Samsung devices like the
F700) is built in Flash Lite.
There is no technical reason for Flash not being supported on the iPhone, allthough Steve Jobs claims Flash would drain batteries too much and so on. The truth is, you could build a lot of apps much easier, cheaper and most important platform-independant with Flash, but then Apple would neither have control over what people run on their iPhones, nor could they squeeze money out of them. That's the only reason why there's no Flash for the iCrap.
I think porting an app to the iPad requires much more than just tweaking the UI. The iPad has a fivefold higher resolution and users will expect more than just an enlarged iPhone screen - they want to get some extra benefit from a so much larger device. Developers will completely need to redesign the UI concept of apps, change the layout and combine dialogues, that are scattered over several screens on the iPhone. That will require much more time and effort than 2-4%. I doubt the iPad will remotely have the success of the iPhone and correspondingly will be the effort of developers to go iPad-compliant. I believe a lot of developers will switch to Android, as it's more powerful, easier to develop as it's open source and the variety and number of handset will explode in the short term, resulting a much bigger base of potential customers. Having experimented with Android development in the last weeks, I've tested them on two devices only, while I tried other resolutions on the emulator. There's really no need to test every available handset in every available color. And Android is actually ready for different resolutions and relative sizing of screen elements already since Android 1.6 (we're on 2.1 now).