Best of luck to you Michael. Have fun having to code in Objective-C on an
apple only hardware for the overly strict and bloated app store market.
While I agree with some of what you said, it is indeed frustrating in some
situations, I think you might have sort of dove in before you realized what
you were getting yourself in to. I've known for well over a year that
android and iphone development meant touch screen no physical keyboard.
Sure, there are some devices with keyboards, but it's never been written in
stone that it would be that way, as such I am amazed any developer would
come to android thinking every device would have a physical keyboard and
develop for that need without thought for those devices that don't have one.
As for fragmentation. I am still baffled by this. I can understand the use
of fragmentation IF and only IF carriers/phone devices build their own
Android UI and apps that are written for Android don't operate on that
device because of that device's implementation not following the spec. There
are without a doubt going to be bugs found, and those can be fixed. The only
fragmentation that I am concerend with is if say Sense UI, or Sony's Experia
UI breaks an app in some way that otherwise works fine on all other android
devices that don't provide their own customized implementation/UI. That
however, is less fragmentation and more manufacturer bad design. It will be
up to them to keep their UI/design in accordance with the Android spec at
large otherwise they stand to alienate their device and lose potential
market share due to issues with not being able to run android apps. How is
this any different than writing say, FireFox for OSX, Windows, Solaris and
Linux.. and some web sites show up differently from one platform to the
next.. or a bug is found on a specific OS implementation. It's going to
happen. It's how the software world works.
As for the issue of supporting older OS versions.. I don't get that either.
As a JEE developer, I suppose we have fragmentation of the database, because
our schema changed and now we have to maintain more than one version, or the
new version of the DB broke something and we had to code around it to use
the latest version. Perhaps the JEE server or JDK on a specific OS has a
bug, so we have to do some if() checks depending on what OS its deployed on
to make it work. This is ALL fragmentation based on the various posts I've
seen about what developers feel is going to cause Android to be fragmented.
I am not a fan of a bunch of if() checks to deal with version issues.. for
example how the 2.0 SDK "breaks" the contacts api. BUT, that said, it's not
that damn hard to maintain, and as many have said, at most you're talking 2
or 3 version changes. If Google/Android redid the contact API every time
there was an update.. yah.. I think Android would be doomed. However, google
and other companies that contribute to android have developers like you, me
and everyone else. We make mistakes. Sometimes in the overall design,
sometimes a single line of code. Regardless, perhaps the original contact
api sucked, google realized that, and redid it to make it a lot better. Thus
2.0 had an API change. If it's for the better, shoot, I am all for it. So
now I got to add a simple if(os == < 2) { us pre-2.0 api calls} else {use
2.0+ api calls}. It's not that hard. As well, only 2.0+ devices are going to
see the 2.0 updated version anyway, so all the pre-2.0 will still see the
pre-2.0 version of the app. If there are bugs in the pre-2.0, then you
branch your repository for the earlier version, fix the bug, merge it, and
build/release it. That's been done for as long as I've been in software.
It's pretty common to maintain several branches at once. So why is this
fragmentation?
On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 6:49 PM, Michael J McLean <[email protected]> wrote:
> I am about to abandon Android myself, after spending the majority of
> last year learning and developing in it. I am not in Canada. My main
> concerns are to do with the difficulty of getting information systematically
> (everything seems piecmeal and you feel that you are always dependent on
> 'maybe' getting help from the forums), and the fact that everything seems
> geared exclusively towards touch screens. I have just completed a useful app
> that does a fair bit and I am pretty happy with it. But for my apps, I
> prefer to use a physical keypad. What a pain it was to get rid of the
> virtual keyboard, finding out how to do so, and then having to deal with
> unwanted side effects. There are still issues of selection and highlighting
> that seem to stem from Android wanting to be in touch mode and me not
> wanting to be in touch mode. My own standard for User Interface design,
> means that an extra keystroke by the operator to sort this isn't good
> enough. Then the problem of fragmentation definitely erodes the attraction
> of Android for me. Oops, some Android engineers get cranky if you say that.
> I won't put my app onto the Apps market. I will rewrite it for a different
> environment and sell it elsewhere. From comments on the forums, the Apps
> market seems to be about the same standard as Android generally, which for
> me is not good enough.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "ian" <[email protected]>
> To: "Android Developers" <[email protected]>
> Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 10:32 AM
> Subject: [android-developers] Should Canadian Android developers switch to
> iPhone instead"
>
>
>
> Hey Canucks:
>>
>> It appears that paid Android apps cannot currently be bought or sold
>> in Canada.
>>
>> Google seems unwilling to clarify this important concern for northern
>> Android developments. Why the silence Mountain View?
>>
>> Continuing Android app development under this uncertainty seems a
>> waste of time indeed.
>>
>> Are any other Canucks thinking about jumping ship? For me, switching
>> now would be a major setback of at least two months.
>>
>> On the other hand at least there would be a functioning Market and
>> many, many more possible customers.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
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