Motorola, that once-great maker of the RAZR flip phone, has been working to persuade developers to join the handset maker on its path towards the Google side, which will serve to support the Android-powered handsets Motorola is planning to launch later this year. And Motorola is really going at this pretty hard: they’ve dedicated not only weekly podcasts and outreach events, but tutorials in building Android apps for potential developers.
This is a pretty smart move as a thriving development community would create a pretty enticing reaosns for consumers to go Android. It’s no secret that iPhone developers are the most prolific; even if most of the programs are silly little things, there are certainly a lot of great tools that allow iPhone users to milk some pretty nifty functionality from their devices. This helps to make the iPhone a pretty attractive device. It then makes sense that Motorola would want to have a lot of neat programs for Android available before their phones launch to try and build up some consumer excitement.
Our concern for Motorola’s plan is that even if they’re encouraging developers to code up applications, they’re still not doing much by way of giving the developes a good sense of the phones that will be hitting the market. Motorola would be wise to give developers some hands-on time with their forthcoming phones as it will allow the devs a chance to think about what sort of functionality would make for a better device. As of now, however, it seems that Motorola is keeping the upcoming Android phones under lock and key.
(Original story via Forbes)
