10 Good Reasons Why Android Will Beat Apple's iPhone by Christmas 2009

(d) There will be an Android Priced for Everyone
Related to the above. Because Google gives manufacturers freedom to design, one can expect Android to appear on cheap and expensive smartphones to cater for all budgets. Google will not charge a penny for the license and will allow extreme customisations as well.

The Dream G1 is already rumoured to cost only around GBP 110 and, just like the Symbian S60 operating system, one can expect Android phones to be offered on contracts across the board. As for the iPhone, well, unless Apple makes a major concession on price - which is highly unlikely - its phone will still remain an object of lust.

(e) Developers, Developers, Developers
There are several reasons why developers will love Android. Firstly, Google allows industry players to add proprietary functionality to their products without having to contribute anything back to the platform since Android uses Apache license - which doesn't have a copyleft clause - rather than GPL. Google has also pledged to build a marketplace for developer based on Apple's model.

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Unlike the Apps store though, this one will be an open content distribution system and will give all the revenues to the developers. In contrast Apple keeps 30 percent of all revenues for itself.

Google is also planning on using community based moderation to weed out suspicious/dodgy software rather than Apple often controversial judgemental system. It has removed Podcaster from the App store without any reasons.

(f) Android Thrives On Open-ness
Google has been criticised because it was not as forthcoming as one could expect with the developer community during the development phase of the Android platform. Android SDKs are partly proprietary and closed source. But that's way better than the rest of the mainstream mobile phone platforms (with the exception of OpenMoko or LiMo).

iPhone's platform is off limits and Microsoft allows very limited interaction with its platform. At least one can reverse engineer Android. As for the hardware side, well, expect Google to be as open as it can be, without any real restrictions on what manufacturers can do.

Android also uses Davlik, a Java layer brought in by Google to improve compatibility which makes it hardware agnostic and opens a wide range of possibilities (see Will Google's Android Run On Apple's iPhone?)

(g) Apple has agenda/set dates
Apple generally releases iPhone every year; the iPhone v1 was launched in June 2007 and the 3G version was released in July this year. Obviously, Apple has to keep significant gaps between releases to plan ahead for further product launches.

Google on the other hand does not have a set agenda and this means that you can expect to see cutting edge technology in Android based phones much faster. Product launches will happen much more frequently than on the iPhone and the competitive landscape of the mobile market means that manufacturers will trim down the "time to market" of new technologies to a minimum.