I agree, but there’s more to the Android platform

Although I agree with Jason Ankeny’s article over at Fierce Developer, “Five things all iPhone and Android developers need to know“, I think he misses one very important key feature that Google’s Android platform has over the iPhone.  And that is giving developers the ability to create and run background processing.  This is important to developers because it allows for more seamless client-server communication.

Imagine a who host of applications which intermittently check a server to  determine if there is new information or are notified by the server that new information is available.  The mobile device could then, in the background download and present the information to the user.  This has two advantages, at least.  First, if the user is not in a 3G area (the T-Mobiles EDGE network where I live leaves much to be desired), the user doesn’t have to wait while a web page loads through the browser, the data (and only the data needs to be delivered) is loaded in the background and then saved client side for quick access by the user.  Another advantage, which is closely related to the first, is that the doesn’t have to initiate the query or surf for the information.  When new data is detected by the client, it is retrieved and the user can be notified.

I have been a serious polling junkie this political season.  I can’t imagine how much time I could have back in my life if I was notified automatically, and could view right on my Android mobile device the latest national and state polling numbers.  But instead, I have to visit RealClearPolitics.com, Pollster.com, or FiveThirtyEight.com spontaneously to determine if new polling numbers are available.

I believe there is going to be a whole host of contracting houses that are going to specialize in not only building mobile compliant pages for existing web sites (I’m sorry, but the full up, desktop version of CNN is still tricky to digest with either the iPhone or Android device, I’d much rather have a mobile specific version that fits nicely in my mobile browser); but also taking a website’s data,  creating client-server protocols to deliver the data, and writing client side views on mobile devices to display the information to the user.

Being able to have this background notification structure on the Android platform makes it ideal for this sort of end-to-end client-server application, whereas with the iPhone (although I could be wrong about this, but my research has shown..) the user will have to launch an application which accesses the server side data, and the user will have to wait for the request to be procesed.  And what if a phone call comes in during this??  The iPhone will cut off the client request to the server and pick up the call, but on Android, the phone call and client side request are handled at the same time.

Anyone have more information on this?  Please let me know if I’ve got the iPhone wrong.