Android 0.9 SDK Beta (r1) a first look
After several months of black out, it’s suddenly new Android SDK day!
This is important as it gives us ‘fan boys’ a chance to take a look at how the new mobile phone operating system from Google is progressing.
Download here:
http://code.google.com/android/
Existing developers should follow the upgrade guide:
http://code.google.com/android/intro/upgrading.html
A few observations:
- Updated user interface/home screen (looks pretty as ever), messaging and picture applications now present. Hopefully this will mean less peering into grainy YouTube videos to see the user interface in action.
- App store still missing (see comment about grainy YouTube videos).
- Applications must be cryptographically signed, so as to identify the developer. This is a new and important feature, but lacks any mention of how this fits into the Android ecosystem. Historically the Java ME implementation of application signing was appallingly bad, so I will be keeping a close eye on how this develops.
- Bluetooth support is conspicuous by its absence. Bluetooth is hard to get right (just look at all those buggy phones over the years), so this was somewhat expected. We are told to wait until version 1.0 for this feature, but I could imagine this sort of thing holding up the whole show.
- Network access now requires explicit permission at install time. Perhaps all those developers with unlimited 3G data plans forgot about the little guys.
- GTalk is now officially *gone* from this release (citing security reasons), which will kill a lot of developers who were taking this shortcut to peer-to-peer.
- There are unspecified changes to the installer, so I will have to do some experimentation with the “adb” to see how flexible this will be.
- They have *fixed* the long startup times bug. Although I didn’t seem much difference with startup time, this always seems to happen when I am giving a presentation (see Murphy’s law).
I will follow up with more detail once I start developing.
Snowball:
I promised myself that I wouldn’t touch Snowball until Google released an improved emulator. Now here it is, I will have to schedule some development time after my vacation next week.
For this SDK release, my Snowball “to do” list looks like this:
- Implement the Wi-Fi Channel, so handsets can share content with Wi-Fi base stations and other users in a peer-to-peer fashion.
- Create a Snowball development kit, including the “Snowball Engine” client application and example code so other developers can try it out.
- Bluetooth support will have to wait for 1.0.
