This is very smart on Google's part. What Android seems to lack is polished apps (at least on the scale of the iPhone), and wooing specific developers could go a long way to remedying that.
Apple managed to get quantity, and with that the quality that you can often expect from the top 5% given enough quantity.
Google's much more surgical approach makes sense in that they can't realistically compete in quantity of apps any time soon, and thus have to specifically seek out quality to compete with Apple.
I think you're partially right, but I think some of that quality is just because the platform puts UX as a top priority. I'm speaking very generally, of course, but there is a reason OSX apps have a reputation for looking very polished vs other platforms.
Reminds me of the "first-to-market advantage" that entrepreneurs talk about all the time. Apple took a huge, huge chunk of market and has had it since the iPhone came out. I think we'll see over the next year or two how well that works for them, and if developer sentiment is an early indicator, there could be some big changes in market share.
Be careful: what you see on HN can be a very bad indicator of the real situation. All that was kind of blown out of proportion. There was kind of poll on HN asking iPhone developers how they feel about 3.3.1 and most of those who do develop for iPhone said more or less along the lines "I don't care much". The biggest outcry was probably from those who never did nor were going to develop for iPhone. At least they found some justification for that now.
It's easy to get scared by rejection stores, but: App Store has close to 200 000 apps now. What are the real chances to get your app rejected?
I've been kind of curious how much 3.3.1 outrage was from people who were already outraged. I really don't know how to get a good measure of that, though.
Apple wasn't first-to-market, and that is why they did so well. Hardly anybody who is first to market does well. Apple intentionally showed up late to smartphone party, letting them watch and learn from the mistakes of their trailblazing competitors.
It's a lot easier to make a good app for the iPhone than for an Android phone. Throw a table controller in a nav controller in a tab controller and you're done. With Android you can mess around with XML for a week and still have an app that looks like crap. I think it's good that they are reaching out, for sure, but I hope they are also really trying to build out their APIs a bit more to make it easier. I've wanted to make an Android app for a while now, but every time I get started, I quit a couple days later out of frustration.
