IPhone Development: Android SDK from an iPhone Developer's Perspective

I haven't looked at Android yet but my experience with Objective C and the iPhone SDK is exactly the opposite of his - I found everything about iPhone development painful. As far as I could tell, Objective C does not work the way my brain does. The Interface Builder does not seem well integrated or make interface design "a joy" - it felt like more a hindrance than a help. The SDK does not make simple or common tasks easy, and the DRM is an absolute nightmare, often preventing a project that worked yesterday from downloading to the phone today for reasons that are mysterious and inexplicable even when surrounded by official iPhone gurus willing to poke at it. ("try reinstalling your provisioning certificates" is for iPhone developers what "try rebooting" used to be for Windows users.)

So maybe Android would be just my thing.

Is it possible that having programmed for the Newton using Newton Toolkit/NewtonScript spoils you for all other mobile development environments?

I've just spent a couple of weeks putting together a simple iPhone app. While I have the benefit of having written some Cocoa apps in the past, I really didn't find it the nightmare that you described.

Of course, the DRM and signing up for the developer program is a complete pain, but waiting and following instructions means it's only a minor hindrance. Even if it's a big philosophical discomfort with the platform.

Maybe I need to work longer at it to discover all the pitfalls?

As a guy who runs an embedded development company, I have to say, Android is pretty costly to do compared to the iPhone OS for any given amount of functionality.

Like usual, the Java everywhere approach of it makes it pretty painful when you have a config file error, as a full 1/3 of those are not really validated with something that will tell you that you made an error.

The business case of "No reviewers" makes it a more predictable platform by leaps and bounds over the iphone though. Having done multiple month projects which apple than sat on for 7 weeks without approving or rejecting after months of being "suggested" to add expensive features (such as in app purchases), I can completely see it being better for companies doing "questionable" things (for apple's overly controlling view of questionable), but otherwise, it's a PAINFUL market, as even if you're the only person in a space, there is likely a guy writing an open source version of your app which he'll then release for free.

What I'd REALLY like to see is someone make a app layer that runs on top of the formal API what was about 2x more consistent and 4x less "javay" in both graphical layout and the amount of hand edited XML files you have to do. I'm thinking about trying http://phonegap.com/ and the http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ to see if they're better alternatives than pure java for customers looking for android solutions.

Then again, android is more powerful than the sandboxed version of the Apple API that they let you use, but that power comes at a cost of a great increase in complexity.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I find UIBuilder to be awful. Unintuitive and almost impossible to grok without some prior experience or handholding.

For my first "hello world" apps I wound up coding the views entirely by hand and skipping the .xib

This is commonly said by people new to Interface Builder. I don't recall hearing of a long-time Apple / NeXT dev or major app that didn't use it, though.