James Pearce was at MoMoBoston and let us know his thoughts about the Android presentation that was delivered there, including:

I remain enthusiastic overall. If Android becomes a dominant platform, then a lot of developer’s problems go away. That may happen. But of course it will only do so over many, many dead bodies - including those of plenty of companies of some significance. So success will be hard and bloody.

But even if Android does not become dominant, it will have shown that there is another way of looking at handset development. As Tom Hume says, it is, at the least, shaking things up a little. What other handset platform has ever exposed a developer’s API a year before any handsets are even likely to reach the shops?

Received and traditional telecoms wisdom is to build handsets for consumers first, operators a close second, and developers a distant third.

What Google seems to be trying to do (with no insignificant bribery too) is to see what happens when you reverse that order - or at the very least make developers feel like first-class citizens in the ecosystem. Build up a head-of-steam with third-party apps before the handsets ever emerge, and as such, an admirable experiment.

But will that be enough to make their force truly unstoppable when it meets the immovable object of today’s ecosystem? I’m certainly looking forward to finding out.