John Gruber: Google’s Microsoft Moment

It makes no sense to me why Chrome OS isn’t based on Android. Maybe there’s a good answer to this, but Google hasn’t given it.

While I don’t understand why Google has two completely separate operating systems, one based on Davlik (a Java VM clone) and another based on Javascript (sharing more in common with the Palm WebOS platform than with Android), I do know why no-one will ever be able to successfully create a framework that unifies mobile and desktop operating systems. It’s why Apple has a separate MacOS and iPhone OS UI framework.

It’s because of the needs of each platform.

Bottom line is this: on a desktop application you can create a rich window and environment that displays everything at once. The best example of this is the Apple Mail application: in one window I see all of my mailboxes, the status of all of my mail boxes, the list of mail in my selected mail box, and the current selected message.

Mobile applications, on the other hand, have limited real estate to work with. Thus, instead of having a single window, the iPhone version of Apple Mail has a separate windows for showing accounts, showing mailboxes in an account, showing messages in a mailbox, and showing an individual message. Within a mobile version of the software we also have a notion of a “view stack”; a stack of modal views which push and pop onto a stack of views–something that has no counterpart in the desktop world.

The development model also differs: on the desktop I may have a model and controller object (from the MVC design pattern) which drives multiple views simultaneously. But on the phone, I need multiple controllers attached to the same model, each controller contains information about what was selected higher up in the view stack.

Knowing that, we can answer the question that John Gruber links: “If I make a screen two inches smaller, should I use Android instead of Chrome OS? If the keyboard works with my fingers instead of my thumbs, I should use Chrome OS and not Android?”

The answer is simple: is the screen so small that your application must be represented as a stack of views (like the iPhone mail application) or can everything relevant be placed into a single window (like the Apple mail application)? If the first answer, use the mobile version of the operating system. If the latter, use the desktop version.