Out of all the various mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry) Android, by far, has the most comprehensive and robust support for development of cloud-based mobile apps. This is clearly evident in Android’s Content Provider, Sync Adopter, and Services frameworks as well as Sqlite.

I highly recommend viewing the i/0 2010 session on the topic.

There is no support for embedded sql data storage in the first release of Windows Phone 7. As iPhone OS 3.x fully supports SQLite, this is where iPhone OS 3.X has an important edge over Windows Phone 7. I have used SQLite and core data (Apple’s object relational model) extensively in my iPhone apps. It’s a very powerful feature allowing sophisticated on-device data models (many-to-many entity relationships and entity inheritance).

But there is some hope as Windows Phone 7 supports C# Linqs (object-relational mapping). My guess is that a future release of the OS will support a version of SQL Compact.

The answer: integrated support for cloud services.

For more than a year, I have been developing iPhone apps. Most of this apps require extensive server functionality. As mobile application market evolve, the game changer will be the cloud-based services aspect of these applications. That’s where Microsoft mobile platform has a significant edge over Apple’s.

I am just starting to dig into Windows Phone 7 development environment, and the deeper I get the more I like what I see. For one, I like using a modern language C#,and  Visual Studio. It’s nice not to worry about memory management, and memory leaks.

My only concern at this point is the performance of the code running on the device. Can Microsoft deliver the close-to-the-metal performance of iPhone’s Objective-C with their implementation C# VM? I’ll find the answer once I port one of my resource intensive iPhone apps to Windows Phone 7 platform.