My friend Ray and I were talking about the growing mobile development market the other day, which got me looking into mobile development again, but this time for fully featured (and connected) phones.

For sure the biggest player at this point is the iPhone, which has even surpassed sales of the once popular and much cheaper Razor.  Now if I only had a Mac Book Pro and an iPhone...  At least 2grand to get started developing.  Then there's the fact that I would have to learn Objective-C along with Apple's proprietary runtime library. 

I did learn a little Objective-C last night "From C++ to Objective-C", which compares C++ and Objective-C syntax, and then installed the Objective-C  NeXTStep libraries and compiler for gcc. 

What a pain, the Objective-C syntax is so foreign to me, but there's a lot of features I do like about the language, especially compared to C++.  The shortened header declarations, single inheritance, interfaces (protocols), reflection, garbage collection, and message based calling.  There's definitely a lot of dynamic runtime flexibility here for something that is a superset of C.

On the other hand I've been looking at Android development... which looks to be so much easier, at least for me.  You can develop on Windows or Linux using Java and Eclipse.  Wait, I've already done this!  I've already created a J2ME app for my Razor and my Palm.  The barrier for entry, at least from my point of view is much lower.

Now, does that mean iPhone development is worse?  No, its probably more lucrative, especially at this point.  The one remaining question I have, is Android or iPhone development in demand in the Seattle market where I live?