Thursday, August 21, 2008

Android closer to final release

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It’s a big week for Android. Google finally released a new version of the Android SDK that is reported to be close to what developers can expect from the final 1.0 release later this year. Just after upgrading to 0.9, our own application busted just as the release notes warned it might. Our application is still fairly small so porting to 0.9 was trivial. It’s a small price to pay for what we get with Android 0.9 SDK.

The full list of enhancements is long. Here’s the short list:

• Reduced UI clutter and usability for Home screen
  
• New or improved apps: Alarm Clock, Calculator, Camera, improved MediaPlayer, Picture viewer, and Messaging (SMS/MMS)
• New development tools were added, such as a graphical preview for
  XML layouts for users of Eclipse, and a tool for constructing 9-patch
  images.
• New and Improved APIs (However, Bluetooth and GTalkService APIs are removed)
  
• Bug fixes throughout.
  

Its been a while since we’ve heard much of significance from Google regarding the Android platform. This new announcement will certainly bring Android back into the spotlight as it also published some hard dates for deployment of the final SDK and the first devices (roadmap). Because we are finally on the road to a finished product and the first handsets will actually ship in Q4, we should expect much of the skepticism for the OHA to let up for a while.

Several sources reporting on this release sumerize 0.9 as a nearly finished SDK that will not likely be changed significantly with 1.0. This perceived stability, along with the more concreate timelines, may help to capture more of the skeptical or hesitant developers and ultimately stimulate growth within the Android application marketplace.

Although excited for now, the community will soon need answers to some obvious questions like when to expect hardware with other carriers like Sprint or Verizon, will hardware be required to participate in ADC II, and will Google provide more support for development environments such as IntelliJ? There are hundreds more questions to be found in the Android discussion groups.

If the roadmap is any indication, the next few months will produce many of the answers we’re looking for.