We created an Android app in XE6 using a moderate amount of code from one of our big Delphi projects. It went OK and we successfully demonstrated the app on phones at a trade show recently, people liked the app. During development we had a few annoyances with how Firemonkey behaved but in general it wasn't too bad.
However getting our existing code (even units with no forms/frames) to work was a bigger issue than expected. We did it in a development branch were we hacked things a moderate amount to get uses clauses and everything to compile with ifdefs, commenting stuff out, etc. A surprising amount of basic classes such as TPoint, TRect, etc (I think if I am remembering correctly) are not available in Firemonkey so we had to do quite a bit of hacking. As a result the 'hacked' development branch can't be used to compile VCL apps and will be thrown out (effectively it was a prototype). The next step is for us to refactor our code properly to allow us to cross compile between VCL and Firemonkey with a minimum of ifdefs. This will be a reasonable sized project so it is waiting while other more valuable projects are being worked on. Based on that fairly limited experience we believe Firemonkey to be viable for serious apps and we think it makes good sense if you have an existing code base which you want to cross compile between Windows and Android/iOS. Whether Firemonkey is the best choice for someone who doesn't need to cross compile is a different matter, you get some benefits from prior Delphi experience but the controls, designer and some RTL portions are different so you still have a bit of a learning curve. Cheers, David. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Eric A Sent: Thursday, 22 January 2015 3:15 p.m. To: [email protected] Subject: [DUG] XE7 and Android Development Has anyone in the DUG : a) done serious Android device development using XE? b) installed and used XE7, particularly for Android apps? If not XE, what are people using/recommending as the best development platform for Android app development? (would be nice if it could be hosted on Linux, but not essential). Eric
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