Android is just
Google-defined brand. It is definition how you are allowed to use
Java on top of Linux on a mobile devices. If somebody wants to use
Java on top of Linux without the Android brand, it is easy. And many
do that, especially in China.
Android has not won any
competition to run billions of different devices in the future. Java
and Linux have won that competition many years ago. I would say that
race was won 10-15 years before Android brand was ”invented”.
That was when Sun introduced Java and almost all of the software engineering schools and unversities adopted it as a programming language for teaching programming.
Practically every device currently available runs Java. There are
cross-platform development environments for every viable platform in
mobile, including iOS, Windows Phone, Android and other smaller
mobile platforms. Nokia dumped Qt development environment, which can be used
to develop apps for every platform. Soon every platform will be able
to run Android apps using some kind of JVM. And there are cross platform Java IDEs already.
Operating systems, or
mobile platforms are commodity today. There is no money in them any
more. When we had PCs, Microsoft made a lot of money with Windows.
Now that is not going to carry on. Mobile is not PC. Software has
moved on. It is possible to get a chipset, some OS and other
components, stick them together and start selling mobile devices.
Innovation is in the user interaction.
