Too much variety.

There seems to be some reticence brewing on the developer side over adoption of Android. Zdnet is reporting on the issue.

What it basically comes down to is fragmentation of the market. As MobiTV CTO Kay Johansson says in the piece, “Right now, Android just adds to the headache of developing different versions of our applications for different operating systems.”

On the PC side, the Microsoft and IBM-compatible (remember when they were called that? Now it's known as x86) combo standardized the platform, for better or worse. This means that a developer can write for Windows and be sure that the vast majority of users will be able to run the software without any additional development work.

Of course the Mobile phone market is different. We have Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile, Java mobile (sucks!), etc. On the mobile LINUX front there are a number of initiatives: LiMo, OpenMOKO, Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded, Qtopia. It's ugly out there. This is undoubtedly the prime impetus for Google's move in forming the alliance and releasing Android: an attempt to standardize. Whether it succeeds of fails in that goal is what make Android either an industry-changing product or just another mobile OS.