Sirius Radio

[Ed Zachary]

Another aspect of the Sirius/XM player is that the player for WM was built using the Browser object. The app creates a browser object and interacts with the online radio feed as if it were someone listening online with IE.
For a while, Sirius cooperated with player developers and made life a bit easier for them.
Then, after the merger, they started using Captcha text to validate users and using a handoff to redirect the online user to another server, and turned a cold shoulder to the player developers.
Since IE is "baked into" the WM OS, there was a whole API available for building and troubleshooting the app.

Not having done any Android development, I cannot say the same about that OS. But it would be a safe assumption that there have not been as many web-enabled apps build for Android as there have been for Windows or WM.
Thus, the longer ramp-up in building a player app.