[Asa-Nisse]

Android "is" java, you cant drop java from android. Oracle is just pissing around. Java support in android just wont go away.

Secondly you cant reverse engineer iOS "API", its a language (Obj-C) and a API. The API consists of surely patented and copyrighted routines. Most of it is called Cocoa and personally I would say it sucks balls. Its a totally different metodology than what most other languages use.

iOS development is if anything even more cumbersome than android-development. I just dont see the point.

Also, there are initatives to crosscompile code (in LUA for instance) to both iOS and android.

[andrewljohnson]

In my experience, iOS development is easier than Android, and it is basically because the docs, and surprisingly the community, is way more complete.

[Skroob]

I don't think that's too surprising. The iOS development community is larger and more established. Should Android development ever make it to a similar scale, I'd imagine the community would be similarly complete.

Documentation, on the other hand, is entirely dependent on Google. And we all know how much engineers love writing documentation.

[ergo98]

>Android "is" java, you cant drop java from android

The Android OS is Linux. The Dalvik runtime runs a unique bytecode.

My x86 processor runs x86 (which in current processors is essentially an intermediate language). In the 80s someone might have looked at the codebase and said "the x86 runs on C", because of course virtually all development was done in C, but that is of course not the case.

Android could move to an entirely different source language (Java was chosen because of the strong support in Eclipse) -- say C# -- but the problem is not the language, but rather Sun cum Oracle's patents on several basic tenets of a secure virtual machine -- it isn't about Java but is "Java-like" behaviours.