No. Don’t be ridiculous.

I mean, lately I’ve been hearing more and more about this and that competitor entering the battlefield of the latest generation of smartphones and inevitably being compared to the iPhone and how it now has competition and people are going to realize it sucks and abandon it en masse and it’ll then have no other option to hide its embarrassment than get a massive coronary attack and suddenly die.

That won’t happen.

Ok, Android phones are starting to come on their own with finally very compelling models and exciting apps. Hey! I may even get one of those when my contract is up next year. Instead of replacing my now noticeably aged HTC Touch with an iPhone I may just get an Android phone. Android phones, after all, are predicted to surpass the iPhone’s sales by 2012, and this may be true, there is a very long bright life ahead of them.

And, sure, the iPhone does suck in many respects. Only one basic model means that inevitably it will lack features some people may want. Big corps IT departments still don’t like it too much (though that is changing) and the voices against its closed app development model are getting louder. But all this doesn’t mean it’s not one of the best options in the market right now, and it won’t be a bad choice even when something better comes along.

But, even when that happens you won’t see people moving in hordes to whatever shiny new toy that is. People grow attached to their iPhones in a way that can only be broken by another shinier iPhone.

The apps environment is another thing that will make iPhone users stick with it. There are 100,000 apps in the App Store right now. Most of the crap, but the other 500 or so are very very useful and some of them can be said to be essential. Any competitor will have to develop a healthy ecosystem of apps around its own solution before making a dent in the iPhone’s market share. And it will need to have a killer app or two to get people really moving.

Google is doing its share of developing killer apps for Android, and its developer community is growing every day. Still, it will take time to create such a mass of apps and useful software and I don’t think Apple will just sit this one out.

Surely the iPhone will disappear one day. Out classed, out gunned and maybe even unloved, though this is less likely, it will dim away to join other revolutionary devices like the Apple II, the Commodore Amiga and the SPOT watch. Well maybe not the SPOT watch, but you get the idea.

But that day isn’t close. Not even remotely. It won’t be in 2012, maybe not even 2015, and after that, who cares? It’s not like you’re buying a house.

So, what does this mean? Very simply that Apple won’t dominate the smartphone market, but it will remain a very important player,just like it is today. It won’t fade away any time soon which is good for the market and development. On the other hand it also means that fanboys will go on with their mindless blabbering, but nothing is perfect.