The cell phone market has been undergoing massive changes over the past few years as Apple's iPhone and Google's Android platform are each competing to become the future of mobile devices.

The winner of this mobile race will come down to a mixture of technical, community, and business factors.  I think there are five key areas where there are significant differences, and I'll be watching for the next few years to see who will win this fight.

1. Market share

Both devices are doing extremely well by taking Blackberry customers away from RIM as well as finding customers that are new to smartphones.  In Q4 2010, Android has caught up with the iPhone, and the two are now tied as the top mobile platforms with Blackberry and Microsoft in 3rd and 4th place, and dropping.

Each device has its advantages for the coming year.  Android has the momentum as it has been increasing its market share at the expense of Blackberries, while the iPhone has remained steady over the past two years.  The iPhone was just added to Verizon in February 2011, and also the iPad remains unmatched in the tablet market.

Advantage: Even

2. Tools

The battle between the devices will be decided by who wins over the hearts and minds of developers. Whoever does this will have the advantage in terms of the number and creativity of applications, which is a major buying factor for customers. More types of applications gives people more reason to buy that mobile device. More creative apps get people talking.

Android's development platform is more open and flexible for developers.  This makes it easier for developers without mobile expertise to build applications.  Android's development tools is also based on the Java programming language, which is more popular than the C programming language that the iPhone's development tools use.

Advantage: Droid

3. Licensing fees

There are important business issues with mobile devices that explain both how the Droid was successful and how its future is uncertain.

As discussed above, device battles are about winning over developers, and before the iPhone and Android, it was extremely difficult and expensive to build software for mobile devices.  Developers would have to spend time getting their software to work on each device and carrier, making it prohibitively expensive for all but the largest software companies.  Phones have been powerful enough for many years to run useful applications, but the economics didn't work.

Sun Microsystems came up with a solution about 10 years ago.  They invented a Java programming language that allowed a developer to write software once and have it run on any mobile device.  This gave developers the ability to create mobile applications for a larger audience, but Sun charged every device manufacturer a fee to run these Java mobile applications.

Google created something similar to Sun, except they give it away to everyone for free.  Google did this in large part by contributing and using Apache Harmony, which is an open source version of Java that is hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. (full disclosure: I am the Vice President for Fundraising at the Apache Software Foundation, and Google is one of my biggest sponsors).

The problem for the future is that Oracle, which bought Sun Microsystems two years ago, is suing Google because they say Google copied Sun's technology. If Oracle wins the lawsuit, we will go back to the pre-Droid era when device manufacturers have to pay to support these mobile applications on their devices.  This could put significant brakes on the success of Android.

Advantage: Droid short-term, long-term uncertain

4. App store

Customers need to find mobile applications, and developers need people to find and buy their applications, and these two come together in the application store.

Apple's iPhone built on the success of iTunes and its music sales to provide a rich app store and has a significant advantage in this area.  Purchasing is simple, editorial content is provided both by Apple and by user feedback, add-on sales are possible, and the purchases build on what many customers have already used to buy online music.

Google recognizes that the app store is an area where they need to improve, and Eric Chu, Google's Android platform manager, recently discussed how they are unhappy with the slow growth of Android's app store. We will see how much Google can accomplish in 2011 to improve this.

Advantage: iPhone

5. Multiple device support

One area that I find missing from press coverage of the iPhone vs. Droid battle is the problems that the Droid will face with the range of devices that it supports.  One is for legacy devices and the other is building applications to fit all devices.

For now, all the mobile devices that run Droid applications were created the past few years. But as the years go by, it is very hard to maintain compatibility across both new and old devices.  As screens get bigger, devices get faster, memory grows, and new hardware features come out, it will be a challenge for the Droid platform to span this range.  Aside from licensing fees, Oracle's biggest challenge with its mobile environment is that it had to support such a range of devices because it had been around for many years.

The other challenge is the range of sizes and ways to interact.  The way a developer designs an app for a device with a keyboard is fundamentally different from designing an app for a device with touch screen.  The way a developer designs an app can vary tremendously based on screen size.  Droid manufacturers are trying to create unique devices that are not the same size as a competitor's, and this will lead to developers becoming frustrated.

Neither of these issues are currently all that problematic to the Droid platform, but both will grow over time.  Conversely, the iPhone does benefit from a single manufacturer's ability to restrict the options and evolve the development environment based on those restricted options.

Advantage: iPhone

Conclusion

I think the iPhone still has the advantage, though the Droid had a very good 2010 and has done a really impressive job catching up.  Its growth in 2010 was based on the advantages the Droid had over the iPhone with developers in 2009, but the gleam on the Droid development environment has since waned.

Apple has a very tall order to compete against the rest of the device manufacturers, but it does have advantages with that, and Oracle's lawsuit against Google's Android platform could significantly impact the Android market.

I'm still betting on HTML5, which is the standard language for the next generation of the web.  HTML5 is adding features that let you do a lot of what is currently reserved for mobile apps. And since there are more HTML developers than any other developer group out there, both the iPhone and Droid have pledged to support HTML5.  My company built our MobileNow platform based on HTML5, and this gives our customers the richest mobile sports interface out there.

Other suggested reading:

Dr. Bob Sutor is the IBM Vice President for Open Systems and made a post last year about questions for developer communities.

PrestoSports' MobileNow platform update from last September.

Sidearm's decision to drop iPhone support.