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Two huge reasons keeping developers on the iPhone -

(1) Ease of development - cocoa + objc isn't very hard, and often is quite fun. Its roots in smalltalk help in the appeal to ruby/rails people, and, let's face it, cocoa apps are just plain sexy

(2) Non-Apple / Android handsets have a terrible distribution system. Carriers are in the stone age and have no intention of budging one bit. I've gotten back evaluation reports from carriers with complaints like how their bottom-end, 25-character wide phone screen couldn't read text, thus they wouldn't ship on any phone. It's attitudes like this that scare the crap out of developers.



Add to that a customer base that actually buys apps. How many other cell-phone platforms have a customer base that buys anything more than ringtones?


I think Palm and Blackberry have healthy 3rd party app markets.


The only people I've met who have either of those devices are "business people" for lack of a better word. A market very different from the iPhone crowd - the hype certainly isn't about bussiness applications. Maybe the demographic is different elsewhere.




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