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There seems to be many arguments here about iPhone’s OS vs Palm Pre and Android OSes. I can tell you from a developer’s perspective after looking into all of their SDKs that iPhone’s SDK is the most matured development environment follow by Android with Palm’s WebOS SDK feeling like it is rushed out the door.

Palm’s WebOS basically uses Javascript for all of their development. It might seem like an advantage considering a lot of web developer can almost instantly develop application for it. But Javascript does not have any 3D graphic object library and Palm does not provide one with their SDK so it order to develop any sophisticated 3D games or programs, you will have to do all of that yourself in Javascript. To make matter worst is that Javascript is basically an interpreted language that simply cannot compare the performance of native code binary programs that iPhone can generate with Objective-C. So as a result, even if the developer decided to do the 3D code themselves, the performance would most likely be terrible. I don’t think anyone should expect a lot of 3D games or programs for the Palm Pre to come out anytime soon.

The lack of 3D library is only one aspect of the SDK that seem prematured. There are also a lot of other things such as poor online documentation and Palm’s Pre simulator does not emulate a lot of functions of the real device that would also contribute to very slow APP developer adoption of this platform.

The Android mainly uses Java for its app development. For the most part, it is quite complete. It provides good documentation and OpenGL ES for 3D graphics. But it’s development environment simply does not seem quite as tightly integrated as Apple iPhone’s SDK complete with graphical layout and development tool. The fact that it uses Java instead of native code will probably mean that its performance will suffer a bit compared with iPhone. But its use of Java also means that the developers can develop Android apps on virtually any platforms.

iPhone’s clearly dominance in their App Store is not by chance or coincidence. Their SDK is top notched development environment that provides good support on virtually every aspect of their phones with nice clean animation support, 3D graphics, sound, network, bluetooth and their famous touch interface. This allows more developers to spend less time to develop more higher quality applications that attracts more users. More users get the iPhone because of the high quality apps which further justify the app developers to continue developing iPhone apps due to the increasing market size. This creates a complete self feedback loop that continues to grow exponentially. This is not something that any of their competitors can or should ignore.

The way I see it; Android got a shot to break iPhone’s App Store momentum; but as it stands now, Palm’s got a long way to go before they will have a chance in challenging Apple iPhone.