The mobile phone world is undergoing a massive revolution as more handsets hit the market with ever increasing sophistication. Chris Bailey, one of our developers in ID, has recently created an application for the Android platform and in this article introduces us to Android and his application.
Over the last month or so I’ve been developing my own little Android application in my spare time. Having just released it on the Google Market, I thought it might be a good time to provide a short introduction to the world of Android.
What is Android?
Android is a mobile phone platform. It’s developed by a consortium of companies; the most important among them is probably Google.
Android differs from its nearest rivals (the iPhone or Blackberry) in a key respect: unlike the iPhone, which is a complete package of both hardware and software owned by Apple, Android is just the operating system – the main software which runs on the phone. In addition, this software is released as open source. This means it’s very easy for phone manufacturers to put Android on their devices, and there are a great number already starting to do this.
Android sits alongside the current generation of ‘smart phones’ which are much more capable than phones of just a few years ago. One of the most important factors of these phones is they are truly internet enabled. They run fully functional web browsers, have (relatively) large, easy to read screens, and are usually purchased with unlimited web usage.
My application, WhatGas Petrol Prices, is a community-backed application which allows people to locate nearby petrol stations and see fuel prices, and which offers updated fuel price information. The information for this app comes from the WhatGas.com community database.
Why develop an Android application?
As an Android phone owner, I already have a vested interest. I’m also interested in seeing how the Android app market develops, how easy it is to develop applications and what the capabilities of the platform are. I was also simply frustrated one evening when I couldn’t find a free app to show me where the nearest petrol station was!
The app has only been out a week and I’ve already got several hundred people downloading it.
So go on tell me, which is best… the iPhone or Android?
As an end user I would definitely say the iPhone’s user experience is a much smoother, richer experience. Its combination of hardware and software means that what it does, it does very well. Android, in this respect, is a bit more of a jack of all trades. It doesn’t feel as fluid or quite as polished. However as a developer, I would definitely favour Android. It has an excellent developing environment (which is based on free, open source tools), it lets you do more with the phone (like running background services) and there isn’t the vetting procedure imposed by Apple when releasing apps. It also brilliantly integrates my Google-based life.
I think we’ll see Android getting a lot more attention over the coming months and years. It, the iPhone, Blackberry and Palm are all revolutionary devices and it will be interesting to see where they go next.
This entry was posted on 18th January 2010 at 5:10 pm and is filed under News and updates. 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.
Leave a comment