![]() ![]() If you are reverse engineering our app right now (hi!), we will have to… deal with it. Any app is bound to run almost unchecked by a central authority on an ant mountain of devices, many of which jailbroken, with close to no chance at solid license verification, reverse engineering, or tamper resistance. Knowing that any script-kiddie can do more or less the same with your app’s code is rather disconcerting.Īndroid remains an open, hacker-friendly OS. The Joy and Pain of Opennessīeing able to debug-step through the source code of the SDK is a joy. The Android APIs are stable, but sometimes we’d have wished them to be less stubborn. Want to handle a text larger than a few 1000 characters? Sorry, the guy who wrote the SpannableStringBuilder class is now enjoying early retirement in Malibu. Hanging indents are not rendered correctly? Yep, since 2011-it’s a feature by now. That can be seen as the reverse side of the coin. Whatever madness has flown into the Android core APIs, it’s there to stay. Whenever the iOS people took a break from laughing at the stack of test devices, they were toiling away updating their app to work with one iOS upgrade after the other. Lollipop is at its core a completely new OS with a new VM philosophy, but when we updated our first device, the app just continued to work. The core APIs offered by the Android SDK have proven to be very stable. So yes, as simple as the app looks now, it was not all sunshine and rainbows. Fonts? Sorry, no, unless you do a bit of DIYing you only get to choose from serif, sans and monospace. After all, we gave you elegantTextHeight. Custom line heights no longer working in Lollipop is considered to be a minor issue. The Material Design guidelines form a impressive, concise design framework.Īndroid didn’t do away with its no-design roots. The pre-Lollipop “Holo” theme already brought UX stability to many app interfaces, and Material Design got the aesthetics right. Having to follow the “carrot” approach inherent to the open source world (as opposed to Apple’s “stick” strategy), Google had to come up with design guidelines that are understandable even to the least designery developer. With the approach we chose, the dreaded Android fragmentation issue was manageable, although we did hit some fragmentation problems in the beta process with exceptional devices or highly modified OS setups. However, a few no-gos aside, the SDK offers a reasonable abstraction of Android’s inherent complexity. Don’t try to think in fixed screen layouts. It is risky to extend Android keyboards: No assumptions can be made regarding their shape and size. We know this situation from Web development, and we know how to handle it: do not make assumptions about the physicality of the devices you are developing for. Or buy a device that comes pre-modded, like the Geeksphone Revolution, or the OnePlus One with the Cyanogen Mod logo already on the back. The core? Android is open source, so why not roll your own. You want to define Comic Sans as a system font? Yes you can. The user gets to leave their imprint too. Physical buttons or virtual ones? Always there or only on as an option? A hardware keyboard? One action bar, a split one, or none at all? There’s choice. Some manufacturers like nVidia stay close to vanilla Android while others go crazy (and weird-looking at you Samsung), rearranging and reshaping whatever they can get a hold on, which is plenty. The square BlackBerry Passport that runs Android apps… By now, we wouldn’t be surprised if a beta user posted a screenshot from a pear-shaped iCarly tablet. The compelling compromise of the Nexus 7. The Yoga Tab 2 built to sit upright on a table. The nVidia Shield gaming tablet, complete with controller and stylus. The HTC One M8 will make many iPhone owners jealous. The Moto G, a smartphone for under $200 unlocked. Here’s what we have learned on the way to the release of iA Writer for Android. Still, Android has come a long way from the unsightly UX and low quality device mess it was just three years ago. We did hit a few bumps further down the road. The iOS people never stopped laughing at the growing stack of test devices in all colors and shapes hogging our developer’s desk. We discovered a dev-friendly world with scant traces of the Android horror stories we had in the backs of our minds. In the summer of 2014, we started dabbling with the Android SDK to get a feeling of what it would mean to develop an Android adaptation of iA Writer.
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