Larry Borsato is a mobile phone applications developer, he could have chosen to write software for just about any mobile phone, BlackBerry, Symbian, even Android, but he passed those by in favour of writing software for the Apple iPhone.

Borsato decided to make a report on why a developer wants to develop for the iconic Apple iPhone handset, and here is what he had to say…

On the BlackBerry: “The BlackBerry is primarily an e-mail device, though it does offer browsing and other applications. Tools are available for development, but it uses Java ME applications, which have a very limited user interface. And the market opportunity is only about 16 million subscribers versus 206 million Symbian devices over the same timeframe. The low subscriber growth rate limits the value of the platform for me.”

The Android: “Android, from Google, is a completely open platform that has the potential to provide most of what the iPhone does. But it isn’t real yet, and there are no devices available to test how well it works in real life. With no current subscriber base, it would be a huge risk to develop for what is essentially a non-existent product at this point.”

Symbian: “Symbian, of which there are multiple flavors, has been around for about 10 years, and yet there has been no substantial uptake of the mobile Web. Now owned by Nokia, it will be open-sourced so that may change, but I’ll wait and see here.”

The iPhone SDK: “Then there is the iPhone SDK, only available on the Mac, and only capable of building applications for a very small though rapidly growing market of devices right now, with over 6 million in use so far.”

“I could have picked Symbian, BlackBerry or Android. I could have written software with a minimalist user interface — a watered-down lowest common denominator — for a fragmented array of mobile devices. And they all provide a Java development option, so my life would have been much easier. But the iPhone SDK has a much bigger advantage.”

“The iPhone has already changed the mobile landscape. iPhone use of the Internet is much higher than that of other smartphones, and far exceeds that of the market in general. Google sees 50 times more search requests coming from iPhones.”

“My choice was a simple one. I merely selected the platform that has already redefined the mobile phone market. And besides, have you seen the iPhone? It is seriously cool. After all, once you get past all the logical reasons for selecting a platform, every developer wants to work on the cool one.”

So there you have it, why a developer chooses to develop for the Apple iPhone, having said that, what’s really stopping a developer from switching platforms whenever they want?

Source — computerworld