[white_devil]

the undisputed weakest and least sophisticated of all the mobile platforms when measured on its own merits.

Oh my fucking God, please. I wasn't sure before, but you just outed yourself as a huge Google -fanboy.

Yeah what's Apple's platform got going for it? -It just changed the whole industry and showed How It's Done. It's also regarded as technically very solid, and pleasant to develop for.

[steverb]

The iPhone did change the industry and it is technically very solid. However, it is NOT pleasant to develop for.

Having developed private apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7 I personally find Windows 7 to be the best platform for development, with Android a distant second. iOS is by far the most painful dev platform of the three.

Unless you really like programming like it's 1985 (a not insignificant number of people really do), in which case it's great.

[white_devil]

Unless you really like programming like it's 1985

Care to elaborate?

[prodigal_erik]

It's 2011, and iOS developers are somehow persuaded to accept a crude imitation of Smalltalk and waste time on "do I need to box this int in a NSNumber?" and "did I get a SIGSEGV because I called [super dealloc] before [field release]?", when the first Smalltalk implementation handled this minutiae automatically on less powerful hardware nearly forty years ago.

[trezor]

It just changed the whole industry and showed How It's Done.

I may not like your tone, but if nothing else you are correct about this point. Apple was clearly the company who made everyone else understand that delivering a good smartphone involved good software in addition to hardware and that good hardware alone was worthless. For this they deserve recognition.

That being said: They created a platform, a very simple and limited platform, which worked adequately for people of limited needs. And for an initial release it was absolutely stunning.

That said, this does in no way translate into a platform which ages and evolves well. My complaints are mostly in this department and this is where I think Android is (and will remain) miles ahead of iOS.

[white_devil]

It has aged and evolved well. A platform cannot both be weak and unsophisticated and show the world how a platform should be done.