A video love song to iPad developers (and a warning to anybody considering Android)
Here’s something that will either warm your heart or make you gag, depending how you feel about Apple’s (AAPL) penchant for self-congratulatory schmaltz.
It’s a five-minute video shot, we presume, for the edification of the attendees at last week’s Worldwide Developers Conference. It features a parade of high-profile, highly successful developers — Callaway’s Nicholas Callaway, Bottle Rocket’s Calvin (“NPR”) Carter, Pandora’s Tom Conrad, ABC TV’s Skarpi Hedinsson, Illusion Lab’s Carl (“Labyrinth”) Loodberg, and Wolfram Research’s Theodore (“The Elements”) Gray — extolling the wonders of Apple’s SDK and the perils of developing for anybody else.
“We’ve actually spent some time working with other platforms,” says Carter at one point. “It’s a night and day difference. They’re more difficult for the user. They don’t have the power or the tools available. They don’t have the distribution network. They don’t have the standards, both in hardware or in software.”
“It is that handset fragmentation, if you will,” adds Hendinsson helpfully, speaking of an unnamed competitor that everybody understands is Google’s (GOOG) Android, “that causes developers a lot of problems. Because you are now targeting individual devices.”
Then, just to nail down Apple’s home-court advantage, Conrad pitches in:
“It’s really evident in Apple’s APIs, in the developer tools, that you’re working with something really mature, not something that was invented two years ago.”
A YouTube version suitable for viewing on an iPad or iPhone is available here and pasted below the fold.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UER_yQGXyV8]
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
