Mike Griffiths

I recently had the pleasure of having a tinker with the Google Android SDK. At first I was extremely impressed at how well the whole thing had been put together. There is a whole array of developer tools, from the very realistic and thorough emulator to the activity logger and the Eclipse plug-in.

I quickly turned from an impressed Mike to a very frutrated Mike. It seems Google’s example code on the ‘Hello Views’ section of the SDK web site is completely flawed. It simply will not compile. Of course, I didn’t expect the code to be wrong, so I didn’t even attempt to hunt round for a solution, I instead blamed Eclipse for being unreliable and thought it had picked on me and decided not to allow me to compile any applications, for no particular reason.

One I got around that issue I found the framework to be reliable and very developer-friendly. I have had some experiences with the iPhone SDK which I do not rate. Apple’s version is bloated and I found it to be quite sluggish. Apple being Apple it wouldn’t be complete without a huge price tag too, charging developers a licence fee for the SDK and then a further fee for publishing the application and then a royalty fee for every instance of the actual app that gets downloaded. Just out of principle I decided to not develop my application on the iPhone. Not to mention the fact that you must use Apple’s own language to develop in.

Enough of an Apple rant anyway. You can built your Android apps in the universal language of Java, which makes everyones life much easier with the tons of IDEs, forums and code snippets out there to use, not to mention a massive user base. There’s no doubt that we’ll be seeing a sharp rise in the amount of apps available for Android in the near future as more and more devices come on the market and more people become frustrated with the iPhone and it’s price tag.

I’ll be creating a few applications over the coming weeks and will post my findings.