Developing for Android

18th November 2008

We’ve just completed our first commercial mobile phone application, a relatively straight forward tech demo providing an image slide-show with accompanying text, with links through to associated web pages!  This is an exciting new avenue for us, one which we feel could be a significant market player over the next 12 months.

Android is the mobile phone platform created by Google that has been open sourced by the search giant, making it available to any hardware manufacturer that wishes to embrace it.  Whilst only one phone, T-Mobile’s G1, has been publicly released there are numerous manufacturers already signed up to the project (Open Handset Alliance) so expect a plethora of new handsets to be released in the coming months.

Native mobile phone applications allow for a much more integrated experience for users than that available via a website, taking full advantage of all the features of the phone.  It is possible to integrate into the phone functions themselves, such as the dialler and contacts list, display web pages, capture and store information locally on the phone, take advantage of the GPS and camera capabilities, save video and audio to the phone for later playback which is not currently possible through the browser, and write services that permanently run in the background which is not possible on the iPhone at all!

Perhaps the most exciting innovation within the Android platform, and one which all applications can take advantage of, is one that most developers and companies may overlook - the notifications system.  This system allows applications to alert the user to new events, placing icons at the top of the screen in the notification bar.   This bar can then be pulled down showing a brief description of each new event, and allowing the user to click through to an application to handle the event.  At first glance this doesn’t sound at all ground breaking, but Android allows for background services to be written.  This would allow, for example, a Facebook application to deliver notices about received messages, requests and notifications that would be handled in the same way as emails and SMS messages received by the phone itself.  This provides a way of pulling users back into the service, giving a level of integration that simply isn’t possible at this time on other platforms.

We have a couple of Android applications in the pipeline, one supporting a commercial website that we are producing with the other two being technical demos written for our own benefit, so we shall look forward to being able to announce more on this blog in due course.