Markus Tripp’s Weblog

Last week Google launched it’s mobile platform Android. In my previous job our company developed applications for Symbian OS and Java ME. So I know the problems and pain for developers to create mobile applications. Therefore I was very interested about this Google initiative.

As many other developers I installed the SDK and Eclipse plug-in. Installation, configuration, programming and running the first small applications in the emulator was extremely easy and great fun. Documentation is also quite good already, so everything is there, that ideas for new applications and businesses can grow.

I predict that next year will be a big change in the mobile market. First, Apple’s iPhone is an amazing mobile phone with unique user interface ideas. But until now developers can only write web applications with some client side Javascript code. Second, Google Android puts a lot of pressure to the other mobile platforms, like Windows Mobile, Symbian, … I already had a clear vision about my personal future direction, but I will probably start to re-think everything. There are probably great new opportunities in developing applications for mobile phones.

After writing some Android demo applications I examined the Android API’s. Android consists of the following parts:

• Android API’s
• Java 2 SE based on Apache Harmony
• Apache Commons Codec for encoding/decoding
• Apache Commons Http Client for HTTP access
• Bluez bluethooth protocol stack
• JSON libraries for light weight data exchange
• Junit test libraries

This is quite OK as a starting point. I will probably come up with some missing libraries when more working with the framework. So let’s have a closer look at the Android API’s. My first impression is, that the interfaces and classes are structured very differently. I assume that the packages are developed by separate teams with no one responsible for the overall API’s. I would have expected cleaner and more consistent class and interface definitions.

Packages

android.location and com.google.android.maps

This is obviously the most interesting and fascinating package. It enables developers to create location based services and even include Google Maps. I will definitely try out these package. And this will probably the basis for many cool ideas and new services.

android.database

Package to persist objects. I looked at the API and was very disappointed. I hoped to find something innovative and easy to use like db4objects. Instead I found something that is even more confusing then JDBC.

android.media

This package contains API’s to control a media player and media recorder. Used to play and audio and video files. Looks quite simple, but I did not find anything about supported codec’s and DRM’s. But as PacketVideo is part of the open handset alliance and contributes to the Android platform, I expect that the most widely used codec’s and DRM’s are supported. Find more at the PV Technology page.

android.speech.recognition

Quite interesting. Speech recognition is a very complex topic, and you have to be careful, how advanced the speech recognition libraries are and what functionality they support.

android.telephony

API’s to establish calls from your application, or send SMS messages. Cool.

android.webkit

This enables you to embed HTML components to your application. Interesting fact is, that Apple’s iPhone and Google Android use the same framework, that is WebKit.

Summary

I’m really very impressed by Google Android. It will definitely change the mobile market, and I will evaluate if there is a business to develop mobile applications for Google Android, Apple iPhones or Windows Mobile. This would really be great fun.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.