Update: Android Developer Challenge Critique
Based on Google group discussions here and here, it seems that Mobeegal and Commandro (both ADC winners) were considering these issues when developing their applications.
“Basically, you’re right, those problems exist and, for example, Commandro has some tricks inside it in order to correctly respond to missing signals, as well as it can be run as a background service (without UI at all) with minimal and rare GPS interaction in order to
keep saving battery.” - Alex Pisarev
Again this turns into a critique of the challenge, i.e. entries that implement intelligent workarounds are totally transparent to the judges.
Summary of points:
- Yes GPS technology will get better, but don’t expect a dramatic performance improvement within the next 3 years.
- Some of the winners used a background service (and other unspecified tricks) to achieve better performance, lower battery consumption and an overall better user experience.
- Intelligent LBS support needs to be baked into the platform, i.e. you shouldn’t have 5 background applications on your phone all attempting to do the same thing. Snowball is my attempt to make this work. I can’t wait to get my hands on real hardware to show what it can do.
