

A Chink In Android’s Armor - rnicholson
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/11/a-chink-in-androids-armor/

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JereCoh
Typical poor TechCrunch reporting...

"We’ve spoken with a number of high profile Android application developers.
All of them, without exception, have told me they are extremely frustrated
with Android right now. For the iPhone, they build once and maintain the code
base. On Android, they built once for v.1.5, but are getting far less installs
than the iPhone."

Is he suggesting getting far less installs is related to maintaining a single
code base? Really?

"They say they’re going to have to build and maintain separate code for
various Android devices. Some devices seem to have left out key libraries that
are forcing significant recoding efforts, for example."

I have experienced broken APIs in Android OS updates, but I've never
experienced a missing library between devices running the same Android OS
version. If he's going to make such a claim, he should back it up.

~~~
kogir
Have you used android devices not made by google?

Of course all devices released by google will be consistent. As more players
enter this space, and each takes liberties with what libraries are available
or how well they're implemented, android development will get progressively
harder.

With regard to sources, everyone who's worked on a non google android device
is probably under NDA.

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bensummers
A few years back, I worked on some software for phones and PDAs running Palm
OS. To do something as fundamental as send and receive SMSes, I had to use a
completely different API on each supported device.

It was a complete nightmare and really depressing work, writing the same thing
over and over again. Google really need to avoid a similar situation on
Android.

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xsmasher
J2ME didn't fracture because it was open source - that didn't happen until
2006 - it fractured from the same issues bensummers points out below with
Palm: too many differences in implementation between different manufacturers
and devices (including bugs).

Phone B supports 1-bit alpha, phone B supports 8-bit alpha, phone C has a bug
where alpha is corrupted in images under a certain size. Once your code starts
looking like a nest of if(NOKIA||(MOTOROLA&&!MODEL910)) you're doomed.

~~~
kogir
You forgot phone D that claims to support phonebook access when queried
programmatically but crashes if you try to use it. Or phone E that supports
camera access but returns all images rotated 90 degrees clockwise.

Both of these are real bugs in handsets with Sun certified J2ME
implementations.

Android might be able to avoid these problems if it required OEMs to pass a
comprehensive test suite and include a bare minimum of libraries, but since
it's open source I'm not sure it can be forced.

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davidw
It's definitely something they're aware of. I know because I personally asked
some of their developer advocates what their strategy was at their developer
meeting in Munich, and followed up elsewhere.

I didn't get an answer, but they're not stupid, it has to be something they're
thinking about. Now, let's just hope they don't screw it up.

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jrockway
Does Arrington _ever_ cite sources or quote people or name names? "I talked to
some people that said some stuff." Wow, how valuable. I have interesting
conversations with The Voices in my head too, but I don't write about it...

Some thoughts: Desktop software suffers from this problem, everyone's
configuration is slightly different. You just have to test the cases, or
simply say, "this software doesn't work on your phone". (If the software is
Free, then this isn't a problem, as an interested user can just fix it
himself. This isn't even a possibility on Apple's stack.) Video game
developers somehow manage to make their software work on PS3s, Xbox 360s, OS
X, and Windows... and phone developers are complaining that they can't support
both Android 1.5 and Android 1.6? Wow, OK. This might indicate code that is
too low-level; Android's own API is not enough of an abstraction layer for the
average use case. (Wouldn't it be nice to write apps once and have them work
on every phone platform?)

I have not done any significant Android development, but so far, everything
has worked as expected. The simulator works like my phone. As a user, all of
the apps I've installed (via the Market or otherwise) have worked just fine.

So I think problems here might be overstated, except for one -- there is no
money in writing mass-market mobile phone apps. (Thank Apple for that one.)

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snowbird122
The mobile phone operating system battle is going to be fascinating over the
next few years. I'm sure it will be studied in business schools for the the
next 40 years. The stakes are extremely high and the market is global.
Hardware, software, and carriers all play an important role. Overall,
consumers will definitely win.

------
listic

      - [Android will be] second most popular mobile OS after Symbian
      - [Android] operating system is free (unlike Windows Mobile)
    

Hm, interesting logic. Seems like Microsoft-bashing infiltrated very deep into
thought process of many authors.

~~~
pyre
I think that the thought is that Windows Mobile is more 'open' as a platform
that Symbian, but you still have to pay for dev tools.

~~~
listic
Oops, my bad. I didn't know that Symbian became open source this year; then it
makes sence.

