His answer is in this thread somewhere, amongst all the mess.
Even then.... I don't understand why you
wouldn't want your Switch to be inter-operable with all your other devices....
Well to be honest the kind of people who are going to port Android are unlikely to be the same kind of people who'd be porting Dolphin.
But I think you've hit the crux of the reason for a lot of the anti-Android rhetoric. It's my view that there are two main types of people who are against Android - theres those that just don't like Android and therefore would be against it on anything, and then there's the people who love to watch a 'scene' grow, who enjoy waiting months and months for small updates to buggy ports of emulators, open source games and media players that work just fine on more mature systems. And having everything available all at once with a port of Android pretty much pisses all over that fire. And there is a genuine chance that if Android is available, then developers might think "well what's the point in porting kodi/doom/quake if it's already available on Android". So in that way, yes it's a threat to the scene... although I'm sure there'll still be a few dye-hard devs who will be wanting to push the device with high-end emulators that don't work so well with the overhead of Android.
Personally, I don't really give two hoots about watching a scene develop; I'm all about instant gratification, and and if there was an Android port available I'd buy a switch in an instant.
First "dye hard devs"... I am now imagining 90s hacker films with tie dye hippy tshirts but for the switch, mainly by way of a hacking montage. Good times.
Anyway I take a slightly different approach.
I don't think android on the switch will damage the chances of people going
http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html on the Switch like they did on the GBA, DS and parts of the PSP*. I think the android being in the world damages the chances of that, or at least on something as pedestrian as the Switch**.
My evidence for this is the end of the DS scene (compare the activity on something like pocketheaven or gbadev with the rise of IOS, or indeed look at what several of the notable devs on the DS did during that time) and general meh that was the 3ds one -- if the DS could do things well and the PSP even better (give or take the asterisk below) then the 3ds should have done stunningly... what did we get instead.
*the PSP was home to a lot of "compile and hope" ports of things because it just about had enough power for it to make sense. It then had the effect of things being far short of their theoretical potential, though still playable enough.
**hard as it may be for some to imagine but the GBA and DS were class leading devices, the switch is basically another tablet. Has some cool features for some around here, mainly as hardware developers seem to be smoking all the crack before trying to clone an iphone, but still just a tablet.
As far as "scene developing" then I am of the position these days that it is not about the device -- it is about the code that results, and I think I might have always been about that for if I look back I have usually been about finding if not the best option then at least a really workable one for people looking to do things and will dismiss things if they fail to do that.
I also forgot to include another of my points I used in earlier switch and android discussions in the earlier parts of this thread. That being ease of coding -- for whatever reason not everybody cares to use C, C++ and assembly to code cool things, fair enough really as it is an awful lot to ram into your head and requires a fairly strange way of thinking. Android however gives people far higher level languages which also gives people the chance to do cool stuff -- back on the DS in 2007 I had google maps on my DS
https://gbatemp.net/threads/treasures-of-gaia-v0-2-released.58659/ , and that was cool and nobody argued otherwise. I would want someone to do something similar on the Switch and to take whatever website/web service the kids are using these days and write a little wrapper so it works with whatever controller options we have here. Most of those don't need hardcore programming languages to do and the end result is something cool.
Yeah but, I wouldn't want Linux 4 nothing either, I only tried it on Xbox original, but it was pointless, XBMC was the best thing ever made.
Depending upon when you joined the XBMC party then Linux on the xbox would have been strange and hard to see any great value in. That said I do have to stick up for it -- if you knew Linux as it was at the time and played to its limits it was good stuff, if you joined it more the xbox scene was winding down then it would have been worse still. I would say it is kind of like linux on the raspberry pi today -- it is not going to replace your PC but you can certainly get a lot of value from it.
With that said XBMC/kodi was truly amazing. I don't know if we are going to see it top lists of "influences" in years to come but I would happily say that even otherwise completely unrelated homebrew scenes owe and awful awful lot to it.
