Standing on the shoulders of giants

Is Android missing prolific developers and writers? I am.

Wikipedia:

Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants (Latin: nanos gigantum humeris insidentes) is a Western metaphor with a contemporary interpretation meaning “one who discovers by building on previous discoveries”.

Apple has a vibrant and vocal community. For developers (and fans) there’re quite a few digital establishments where one could go to clench the thirst for news, discussion and, most importantly, knowledge. Famous Apple bloggers are playing not only a big part in providing news and commentary, their link-style posts also point (aspiring) fans and developers towards the places where other writers and developers share their knowledge. Knowledge doesn’t have to be code, most of the time it’s about philosophy and design choices1 .

I’ve been following the smartphone and tablet market for quite a few years now. My own money so far has mostly been spend on Apple products. Due to my involvement with Tablets Magazine I’ve used pretty much every Android tablet to come to the Dutch market. I’ve been reading massive amounts of reviews and following all kinds of news. The most important Apple/iOS news and developments I get from places like John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, Jim Dalrymple’s The Loop and Frederico Viticci’s Macstories . My RSS reader is full of all kinds of interesting blogs that I’ve found while following links on those websites. I’ve also found a great number of interesting and vocal developers to follow on Twitter. My information diet as an interested follower of both markets is very much skewed towards stuff that’s written by people that could be consider on the Apple side of the ‘war’.

I would like to balance things a bit, and have been wanting to do so for quite some time. But where I have sites like the three I mentioned just now to point me to blogs written by people like Daniel Jalkut Marco Arment, Matt Gemmell, Brett Terpstra and many (many!) others I just can’t find the right place(s) to point me to similary interesting Google/Android bloggers. Can someone please tell me where I can find them?

I’m sorely missing them in my daily consumption, and if I am I image others are too. Aspiring Android developers that have similar difficulties finding the type of knowledge the aforementioned sites provide are in a real disadvantage. I’m convinced apps evolve more quickly and to a higher level on iOS in part because of the commentary the vocal2 Apple community provides. Not only because Apple users spend more money on apps.


Footnotes:

1: I’m intentionally leaving out links to places where actual development problems are shared and solved. There’re plenty but I think there’re also widely available for Android.

2: I only linked a few sites in this post. I didn’t even throw in any podcast links. The same discrepancy exists though.

 
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