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Speaking at the eComm conference in California, Google's group manager for mobile platforms laid into the iPhone's development potential. "There are just certain apps you can't build on an iPhone," said Rich Miner, claiming that applications can't run in the background when switching to a new application, and bemoaning the lack of support for multiprocessing apps. "There's a lot of restrictions," he added.

By contrast, Miner said Google's platform is based on openness: the company issued a SDK for Android at launch, while Apple only recently gave third-party

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developers to its device. "There are things I saw people doing with the first version of the Android SDK that it seems like you can't do with the iPhone at least at the moment," he claimed.

And while Miner praised Apple for getting a lot of things "right first time" with the iPhone, he remained confident that Android-based devices will outsell Apple's seminal handset. "Once you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there's a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone," Miner said. "There's a single [iPhone] manufacturer, it's targeted at a particular demographic, and it falls far short of the 1 billion mobile phones sold every year worldwide," he added.

However, Miner had to face down questions from developers, who pondered whether to code for the already strong-selling iPhone, or the plethora of potential Android devices that won't arrive until the second half of this year, at the earliest.

When asked how many Android systems would be on the market within a year, Miner responded: "That's a hard question to answer." However, he claimed there would be several devices on the market in 2009.