OMG: Cupcake to kill Android OS?

This is not inspiring news. It seems, at least according to Big in Japan developer, Alexander Muse, the cupcake 1.5 update may break many third party applications. The update is supposed to go live in Spain tomorrow, leaving developers to scramble to come up with a solution.

For a phone that has sold over a million units just in the US to have some of the things that make it a popular phone stop working is a problem. Consumer confidence not just in the G1 phone but in the OS as a whole could be severely impacted by this. Putting developers into a situation where they must move swiftly to fix what the update brings is playing with fire.

The woes don’t end there. It would be a lot easier to come up with a version of your app and be done. But the problem quickly becomes the Android App Market will only allow one version of an app in the store. So any new entry must also be backwards compatible. I am seeing a bunch of late night coding sessions, courtesy of cupcake.

For users that picked up the G1, being the early adopters shouldn’t mean your favorite stuff breaks. This is not how you build an OS with super powers, rather it is how you get developers to flee to other operating systems.

Source: [Android Community]