Patent ruling against HTC may be a blow to entire Android ecosystem

While Google's Android is the nation's fastest-growing mobile OS, Apple may still hold the most sway over the industry.

The U.S. International Trade Commission, responding to the first of several back-and-forth patent-infringement suits filed by Apple and HTC, has ruled that HTC's smartphones infringe on two Apple patents.

The initial ITC ruling is unbinding, and HTC plans to "vigorously fight these two remaining patents" before ITC commissioners make their final decision, said HTC General Counsel Grace Lei, according to a number of reports. Should the commissioners decide the same, the ruling could bar the import of HTC handsets into the country. To prevent this, HTC said in a statement that it has "alternate solutions" for working around the issue, and analysts suggest HTC could simply pay Apple royalties for use of the patents.

HTC may not be alone in this. A deep-dive into the offending patents' text by patent expert Florian Mueller, Apple Insider first reported, found that the violations regard technologies that are part of the basic Android architecture, versus anything specific to HTC, and so are "most probably built into each and every Android device out there."

Mueller added that this latest Apple suit isn't just about patents, and isn't just a message to HTC.

"It’s a fallacy to assume that Apple v. HTC is just the usual patent dispute between two large players, and therefore going to have the same kind of happy end," Mueller wrote. "This one is different. From a shareholder value point of view, what Apple needs to achieve — even if it costs a lot of time and money — is as much of a technological gap as possible between its own products and the Android-based products offered by HTC and other vendors."

Apple isn’t alone in enforcing patents and perhaps ultimately placing a patent “tax” on Android manufacturers. Microsoft (MobileDevPro: Microsoft goes after Samsung for a piece of each Android smartphone sold).

The news comes with Google last week posting record-breaking revenue (CP: Google 'side businesses' exploding, offering telcos opportunities, competition) but support from its developers sliding.

The iPhone vs. Android Ebb and Flow

According to new data from Flurry Analytics, developer allegiance is shifting from Android to iOS.

"Since resources are limited, the choices developers make in building for different platforms strongly signal their confidence in those platforms," wrote Flurry's Charles Newark-French in a July 14 blog post. "They are literally investing their R&D budgets in the hopes of generating future revenue."

More than 45,000 companies across more than 90,000 apps use the Flurry Analytics, and the company found that from the first quarter of 2011 to the second, the number of new developer projects in Android fell from 36% to 28%, while iPhone/iPod Touch projects grew from 54% to 57% and iPad projects grew from 10% to 15%.

Newark-French opined that PayPal's recent acquisition of Zong (CP: eBay's $240 million purchase of Zong a major win for carriers) may suggest Google wasn't enabling consumer payment easily enough, and that the iPhone's launch on Verizon and also the rising costs of developing on Android (MDP: Microsoft Goes After Samsung for a Piece of Each Android Smartphone Sold) may be contributing to the defection from Android.

"With developers pinched on both sides of the revenue and cost equation," Newark-French continued, "Google must tack aggressively at this stage of the race to ensure that Apple doesn’t continue to take its developer-support wind."