Not the case.

I refer you to this piece written by Richard Hyndman, Head of Development for Mippin.� Richard is a decent programmer and after 3 days of playing was able to deliver a Mippin Android app, thus:

The result of my time spent on the Android SDK is the Mippin app, which is now in the Android Market Store. That’s right I finished the first version of the app yesterday evening and within 10 minutes I’d signed up, paid my $25 to become a registered Android developer and published the app into the Market place, seconds later it was live for download. That was a great experience, so simple, I spent the evening checking my phone every half hour to see how many downloads the app had and to see the comments coming in. In the first 12 hours there were over 3000 downloads – not bad.

I’ll need to grab Mippin when I’m next on the G1.� Excellent work Richard!

Fring promises all the usual call and chat functionality you’d expect from VoIP, and it integrates with a whole host of other services, including Skype, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, Twitter, Yahoo! & AIM, with a single contacts list.

I can’t imagine the likes of Apple being happy about this – the iPhone needs to please its ‘carrier partners’, and most operators haven’t been exactly ready to embrace VoIP just yet. Others have suggested that Apple might be working on its own VoIP app, and therefore unlikely to embrace the budding competition. Either way, Apple has shown when it released updates that bricked jailbroken iPhones, it’s not shy of taking drastic action when iPhone users are doing things with the device it doesn’t like – and that doesn’t bode well for VoIP.