Hi Tom, Emulators are great for "happy path" testing, meaning they quickly allow you to test your program without a real device. But don't confuse this for how your users are gonna thrash your game on a real phone in their real worlds. :)
A couple of things you won't be able test very well on an emulator: 1) Orientation changes Changing the phone's orientation destroys and recreates the currently displayed view. Your users will change orientations at will when they need to type something (at least prior to the 1.5 on screen keyboard.) If your app is in the foreground, this destroys your current activity and creates a new one. 2) Low Memory Conditions The Android Java VM will do whatever it can to keep the foreground process (the one with the UI focus) responsive. To this end, it will need to start freeing up resources from other apps when needed, and, in rare instances, will kill background apps. This is where I ran into most of my problems with my game. I didn't account for users doing normal things like bringing an app up, using it for a bit, pressing the home button, going somewhere else, maybe even putting their phone to sleep for a while and then coming back to your app later. You'll need to plan for this! If you haven't already done so, study this backwards and forwards and memorize it: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#ActivityLifecycle 3) Forcing Android to terminate your app and relaunch it (yes, Android really does do this sometimes) Do you have any background threads running that assume certain resources are around that may have been cleaned up while your app was in the background? Make sure that all the code you need to initialize your app gets properly called in the case where your app gets killed, but Android launches the activity that was last on the top of the stack. Hope this helps, - Mike --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Beginners" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-beginners?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
