Do a search for browser on the app store and you'll find 2 pages of results. I counted ten that were web browser before I got bored.

This is a complete non-story and is just Opera trying to drum up some publicity for the release.

I had to port a mobile app to both iPhone and Android. The Objective-C wasn't much of a barrier as I already knew C and C++ so it was mostly just syntactic sugar.

Of the two platforms the iPhone was by far the easiest to get my head around - in terms of architecture an iPhone app is very close to writing a desktop app.

Android on the other hand has a completely different approach, it took a lot longer to understand and get productive with. You can do a lot more with it, but it's definitely a bit odd.

I've also written a couple of my own iPhone apps, one of them quite cool (Sudoku Grab) which was featured by Apple for a couple of weeks and one of them just a silly game to learn open gl. They make enough to justify the amount of time I put into developing them and the amount of money I've spent on marketing (approx 0). I chose the iPhone platform to develop against simply because it was the one I felt most at home programming against.

However, my money would be on the Android platform becoming dominant - it's going to have a few issue, device fragmentation being the biggest one.

What amuses me is how no one seems to have learned any lessons from the past. I remember working during the dot com boom and a typical conversation was "There's billions of people in the world on the internet - we just need 1% of them to use our website, that's just 1 person in every 100! We're going to be rich!".

I actually had someone telling me exactly the same thing about the app store the other day "there's millions of iPhones....."

Seriously, you code for a living and have never heard of scrum? Do you not keep up with the latest fashion in development? What will you do when you if you have to go for another job and the interviewer asks you about the latest development methodology that is doing the rounds?

Yes they do. My own app Sudoku Grab got a review from someone saying that a competing app was much better. Out of interest I checked to see what other apps this reviewer had reviewed.

He'd reviewed 6 other competing apps, all of the reviews suggested that customers should buy this other app instead.

There's not much you can do about it, just have to hope that customers are savvy enough to see through these marketing tricks.

Never stopped them before

Objective-C is very easy to pick up - any half competent C/C++ developer with basic OO knowledge should be able to pick it up straight away.

The people who struggle are the ones coming from a java background who have never seen a pointer before, don't understand that there isn't a garbage collector etc..

The really nice thing for getting started when you compare iPhone and Android development is that an iPhone application follows a fairly traditional architecture. You are basically writing a desktop application with a slightly different style of UI.

The Android architecture is frankly completely insane. Longer term I'm sure what they've done makes it easier to extend the underlying system, but in terms of getting started it puts a huge barrier in the way. To even write a simple hello world application you need to learn a whole new way of writing applications.

Ever had to get someone on a mobile phone to type in a link?

There's also an ad-hoc distribution method where you can share 5 copies of your app with others, but they too have to be registered and there's a key exchange process. so you can't just hand out the app or install just any app.

Ad-hoc distribution: you can install on 100 devices. All you need is the device id. You send out the application and mobile provision file.