I few weeks ago, I commented on
Hinkmond Wong's horn-tooting over the availability of Pandora on Java ME , then made a little joke about how it was also on the iPhone and being downloaded like mad. At a big confab for mobile developers,
the numbers came out : Pandora's paid monthly subscriptions have amounted to about 12,000 over about 18 months, whereas in two weeks there have been 250,000 iPhone downloads. Now, this isn't a fair comparison, because the iPhone version is free, but here's the thing: the iPhone version is going to stay free, because Pandora is going to make money (they hope, at least) by making it ad supported. And that's something that
no other carrier allows them to do.
For all the talk about how Apple's iPhone SDK was so restrictive on developers, it sort of shocks me that such a basic option for apps was unavailable to developers anywhere else. And of course buying (or downloading for free) new iPhone apps is an order of magnitude simpler on the iPhone than they are on any other handset. On the surface, anyway, this has nothing to do with the language the apps are written in, which is why Java's exclusion is so frustrating to Java developers (though no doubt Apple would argue that iPhone apps are so simple to write because the platform is narrowly defined, and easy install and use precisely because there's no mucking around with a VM).
And what about Android and its Java-based App Store competitor? "I need Android like I need a hole in the head," said Pandora CTO Tom Conrad, calling it "another OS platform that sits on top of buggy firmware, with devices with hundreds of manufacturers, with different characteristics."