evinfinite

It is at this point that I feel obliged to point out that Apple already ships an office suite for the iPad and, bizarrely enough, even the iPhone: http://www.apple.com/apps/keynote/ - http://www.apple.com/apps/pages/ - http://www.apple.com/apps/numbers/

Just a point that needs clarification: how is any of this comment relevant to the points raised in the OP? That is, how does this help against the fact that Android has:

* A much more complex set of (good!) abstractions that are poorly documented;

* and, if I might add alongside the OP, requires a much higher workload in terms of code length and complexity, debugging, device configuration management and tools for what seems to be a much lower payoff?

I have a successful iOS app out, and I tried to rearchitect it in a manageable way to port it on Android. What I found out is:

* The code would be roughly twice as much as the iOS version.

* A proper UI effort would require roughly 2.5x work than the iOS version, as I need to prep up a flexible layout that will work on phones (the buckets 'small' to 'large'), and then another for tablets (actually up to two: 'xlarge' and Honeycomb, which may require some rethinking to accommodate the new action bar). Contrast this to two, fixed-size layouts for the iOS version.

* I already have a path for implementing backgrounding on iOS and it requires minimal change to account for services not available while backgrounded; otherwise, code is exactly the same. On Android, I would have to plan for it from the beginning and set up very poorly documented IBinder stuff to have my Activities talk to a background Service.

* The general unwillingness of Android users in the face of paid apps, and a use model that does not lend itself easily to the insertion of ads, would make my (more costly) effort go unpaid.

I must admit I have never used resources other than developer.android.com and Google, and the latter didn't help me as much as (as little as) developer.android.com did. There might be an excellent book on all of this, but I haven't bought any — any recommendations are welcome.

So, what is Chrome Web Store? Chopped liver?

The rumors all point to major ecosystem builders cutting the middleman and in-housing hardware dev, though.

Not rendering magazines as 500MB packs of PNGs would be a start.

I find it rather silly to be worried about security given that Apple's one of the largest browser vendors in the world, directly or indirectly via WebKit.

More accurately: all increasing of capabilities in non-immediately-apparent sources IS cause for concern. But that has to be weighted against the exhibited competence of the vendor. I find it unlikely that we-vet-everything our-brand-name-is-safe-computing-experiences Apple wouldn't have considered security in this move.