The Java API to Android's Telephony Stack

The LiMo Foundation is an industry consortium that defines an open, Linux-based software platform for mobile phones. So far, this sounds very much like Google Android, but when you look closer, you discover many important differences. First, LiMo is a consortium of many companies, while Android is a pure Google affair. Among LiMo's members are cellular operators, mobile phone manufacturers, semiconductor companies and software vendors—pretty much the whole mobile industry. Member companies include NEC, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Vodafone, Motorola and many other large telecom companies.

Google and the Android Open Handset Alliance (OHA), on the other hand, are newcomers in this market, and they will have to persuade handset manufacturers to adopt their platform, which, in some cases, means ditching their own platform in favor of another one. The LiMo Foundation was created long before OHA, which explains why there are dozens of LiMo-based phones on the market, compared with only two Android ones. Note, however, that the OHA members list is impressive as well, and it continues to grow; many companies are members of both LiMo and OHA.

Another important difference is that the LiMo Foundation does not provide an SDK. As a consortium, it is responsible for specifications only, and it defines a very clear and comprehensive specification of all the components of the LiMo platform, including a full telephony API both for applications and cellular modem vendors, which is once again something that Google Android lacks. The API was defined by companies having significant experience in this field, and it is not surprising that it includes all the telephony features one would expect, such as support for dialing/call answering, SMS, network selection, SIM access and more. It is up to LiMo's member software companies to produce LiMo-compliant SDKs. None are available at the time of this writing, but a few companies made announcements during MWC09 (Mobile World Congress), and we should expect the first versions some time during 2009.

The LiMo platform architecture shown in Figure 3 consists of an application manager and User Interface (UI) frameworks, and middleware running on top of the Linux kernel which provides access to all hardware peripherals, including cellular modem and device drivers.

Figure 3. LiMo Architecture Block Diagram

Contrary to Android, applications are written in C/C++ instead of Java, and the UI is based on GTK+. The LiMo platform provides applications with all the services that one would expect from a mobile phone software stack, such as UI, application management, telephony, networking and messaging, IPC, multimedia, database, security and more.

For more details about the LiMo architecture and API, check the relevant whitepapers on the LiMo Web site.

Even though LiMo currently dominates the Linux-based phone market, Google Android has created a huge momentum that may change this situation. It also is possible that, in the end, each software stack will be used in its own niche: Android in the high-end smartphones and LiMo in more conventional devices.