On Oct 27, 9:12 am, "Mark Murphy" <[email protected]> wrote: > > That's a slippy slope to start on JP, not long until we're building > > for vendor specific custom OS's and then versions of those OS's. > > You don't need to do that.
Of course that's true for a lot of apps Mark, but certainly you know, as does anyone who's ever maintained production code, that upgrades break things. It's just inevitable. On 1.6 we had two things break: one was due to Google tightening up something that should have been checked before but wasn't, and another was due to our using an intent that I assumed was public but that changed in 1.6. Neither of these were Google's "fault", but they broke us just the same, and two weeks is a ridiculously short amount of time to test on a new OS level, fix bugs, run through QA, and release. Hence my first point: we need to have access to beta releases and release candidates, just as every major OS vendor does it. As for the second point, even in cases as simple as these two bugs, sometimes there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. You may find yourself having to go through ugly conditional contortions to handle the different OS versions, and in some cases you may just not be able to satisfy multiple versions with the same code base. To say nothing of wanting to take advantage of features in a new version while still having your app run on older versions. That's why we need to be able to publish releases for different OS versions. Again, this is something that you can handle easily on other OSes, if only by providing different install packages that support the different OS versions. We just need that same flexibility to be provided through the Android Market as well as the third-party markets. Neither of these points seems controversial to me, and clearly they have been a source of frustration for many Android developers. More to the point, they threaten to seriously degrade the end-user experience across all Android devices, which will only play into Apple's hands. I'd really love to hear some Google folks weigh in on this. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" 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-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
