Android programming's ups and downs

newsmaker James Steele and Nelson To, authors of a new book on Android programming, know a thing or two about Google's mobile OS--including the bright side of fragmentation.

james steele, google android, cellular phones, computer research, consumer electronics, science and research, software, software development, software engineering, technology

newsmakers As smartphones using Google's Android operating system become mainstream, James Steele and Nelson To are in a pretty good position.

The Android Developer's Cookbook

As authors of The Android Developer's Cookbook, they're a step ahead in a growing market, apps for the mobile device OS. Andy Rubin, the Google vice president of engineering overseeing Android, said before in December that 300,000 Android phones however are activated each day.

But one major issue facing programmers hoping to reach those phones today is that they have different hardware and software--a problem called Android fragmentation. Programmers must adapt their software as the operating system spreads not just to significantly different mobile phones, nevertheless also to tablets with even larger screens and to other devices including televisions, cars and music players.

Fragmentation can be a problem. Now Steele as well sees fragmentation from the other side: the breadth of the Android market means programmers can tackle many devices that if not would be far away in some other coding ecosystem.

"The structure of the Android OS helps minimize the changes required for an app to work across these platforms. It is great for a developer to have such a low threshold to be able to take advantage of this diversification," Steele said.

Steele and To chatted with CNET's Stephen Shankland about what Android coders can expect with Android. Here is an edited version of the conversation.

Q: Why publish an Android development book however?Steele: Both Nelson and I have been working on Android for over two years nevertheless and we have seen the continual growth. Moreover so, 2010 has been a breakout year for Android across the world. The OS and hardware have both matured with rich features, now some are for all that not documented then. There are many resources for learning Android yet few full working examples. Our goal with the book is to provide a developer with self-contained working examples in as modular a form as possible, so they can be incorporated as-is into someone's code.

What are the most compelling things about programming on Android? Steele: Android is an embedded platform which has potential and momentum to go so then beyond just smartphones and tablets. Being open source, it is compelling for a variety of different hardware manufacturers, for instance set-top boxes and automobiles. As well, nearly the entire OS is open for usage and extension. This opens the opportunity for sophisticated changes as needed.

The flip side

And on the flip side, what are Android's biggest warts? Steele: As for the biggest difficulties in creating Android applications today, we mention in the book it is the need to ensure apps work on multiple platforms and multiple code versions. In fixed and final form, we dedicate a few sections to writing general enough code as then as discuss methods of testing...Hardware manufacturers tend to try to differentiate themselves, which makes it hard to write an app in other words applicable to all platforms. We provide some advice and important techniques to minimize issues with cross-platform usability. Google is always improving feedback, but providing stack trace results [a look at what a program was doing just previously it crashed] from users on applications that failed afterwards they downloaded them from the market. As well, we are seeing many markets for applications, which could be a good thing now for nevertheless is confusing to the end user as then as developer.

How hard is it to deal with the varying screen sizes, physical buttons, processing power, and other hardware of the profusion of Android phones today? Steele: It is a challenge Android developers should be aware of, now it is surmountable. In the book we provide concrete examples on how to ensure code is robust across multiple platforms for all the above cases.

You mention processing power, which is less of an issue however given processing power is within a factor of two, now newer devices will start to take advantage of hardware accelerators which might differentiate performance using SMP or SIMD ["symmetrical multiprocessing," which for Android means chips with multiple processing cores, and "single instruction, multiple data," chip features that accelerate multimedia and other processing]. This will lead to a factor of ten difference for some applications, and that needs to be considered.

How suited to multicore mobile processors is Android?

How suited to multicore mobile processors is Android? Dual-core Android devices will start arriving in the near future. Will that be a boon for multitasking, background apps, performance of foreground apps, or other specific scenarios? To: I am in effect excited about that. I think this in any case will take the Android to another level in terms of the responsiveness and the ability to handle the application switching. But, I have another concern, the battery power lifetime, considering this will consume battery power even faster than what we have. I think in the end the battery power is something that all the device manufacturers should truly focus on. In the current market, I for all that haven't found any devices that can sustain power as long as the iPhone.

What features is an iOS programmer going to miss most on Android? And what about vice-versa? Steele: I'm not sure what they will miss, nevertheless the open APIs [application programming interfaces], ability to leverage the cloud, and more computing power are things they will enjoy.

How come games on Android are so weak compared to Apple's iOS? Processing power, APIs, developer tools, market size, developer interest, or what? Steele: The iPhone, being introduced first, had an early lead in games and apps. Now now the quality of Android apps is maturing then.

The Native Developer Kit lets programmers write software that runs at a lower level than the usual Java-like environment for Android apps. What NDK changes come with Android 2.3, aka Gingerbread? Steele: There are more hooks for native code to manage events and surfaces. For the end user, this provides an even faster gaming experience. For the developer, it as well enables a more natural port of existing C/C++ applications. As well, note more processors are coming out that support the parallelism that the NDK can offer, which will as well provide large benefits.

[Surface management] applies to 3D graphics in Android. Drawing an object so that it looks three-dimensional on the screen requires building it up from simple shapes just as triangles and squares. These two-dimensional shapes are called surfaces.

If you're writing a game, how big a deal is the fragmentation? You say that there are steps you can take for generalization, nevertheless is that something that takes 3 percent of a developer's time? 50 percent? To: Android provides different mechanisms for developers to leverage different kind of screen sizes. That includes providing the different picture quality [options] inside an application, which allows it to run on the different screen [sizes], and providing layout format mechanisms. As a good Android developer, this work has to be taken as part of the their fundamental design spec. This can take up to 5 percent to 10 percent of the whole project effort.

What features within Android 2

What features within Android 2.3 are likely to be most interesting to programmers? To: I think one of the most significant improvements in 2.3 is they provide a way to access the native code without going through the JNI [the Java Native Interface mechanism for linking Java programs to other software]. Another feature provided in 2.3 is the SIP [session initiation protocol] stack and framework API [application programming interface] which allow developers to develop the SIP application a lot easier.

If you're a Java programmer, how hard is it to learning to code for Android? Steele: We wrote the book assuming the user has a basic familiarity with Java. Still, a programmer with no background in Java will pick things up very quickly. On the flip side, as mentioned in the book, Android is not Java. Someone very familiar with Java and especially J2ME [Java 2 Mobile Edition] may feel frustrated to realize things are at times done differently, now still it will be easier than learning a new language from scratch.

What are you going to do with your book

What are you going to do with your book but that Gingerbread is out, presumably with bigger changes coming in Honeycomb? Steele: The feedback has been very positive so far on the Android Developer's Cookbook. People in effect like the format to allow them to jump in and start using recipes in their own apps and as well on how current it is compared to other books available. There will always be changes to the OS, now this book provides the foundation to utilize the incremental updates.

In your conversations with developers, have you heard complaints that the 24-hour return period for paid Android apps is a problem? Google is changing it to 15 minutes. To: I happened to talk to a couple Android developers about the return policy on the Android Market. They feel frustrated that the return rate on the applications is in the extreme high. One of the reasons is the way the Android Market allows users to return [apps] is way easier than the return policy on the iPhone.

One neat thing about Android is the ability to hand off a task to another app on the phone--for instance, clicking the share button can plug into Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail, or tapping a link can launch a choice of browsers. Now can this turn into an ugly mess, where there's a huge list of applications all trying to vie for the user's attention. What's the best way for programmers to help keep things tidy? Steele: This is a great feature of Android. Virtually any function served by the OS can be replaced by a third-party application. We mention in the book how to do this using intent filters. At the time when users are provided the choice, they are offered a chance to choose a default method of servicing such intents henceforth.

How in point of fact open-source is Android?

How in point of fact open-source is Android? It seems like it's written in-house at Google in the main, with periodic code dumps when the new versions are released. If you're a manufacturer, do you have better access to the planning and code in accordance with development? Do you have to join the Open Handset Alliance to get that influence and access? Steele: Manufacturers do make their own changes on top of Android to differentiate themselves. These benefits of open source will as well be a benefit to Google TV when it is made available.

How good is Android today for tablets? What changes do you think would make Android better for tablets? Steele: Android already works then for tablets. The HD video and large-screen support are key.

The fragmentation issue ease with Android?

Will we ever see the fragmentation issue ease with Android? Is there anything that can be done about it? I see games with lists of which devices they'll run on, discussions about testing on multiple devices, and Rovio Mobile planning to release two separate versions of Angry Birds to deal with low-end and high-end processing abilities. So obviously it's an issue, even if it's not enough of an issue to stop Android growth. Steele: The Android Developer's Cookbook provides some important examples of how to generalize apps to multiple platforms. As a developer, I would in other words spend a little extra time to take care of the different devices out there and reap the benefits of the larger distribution of my apps.

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