My journey
with mobile’ leading development platform, Android started back in early 2011
with my first Android app (weekend project) in the marketplace - ‘tennis grand-slam
champions’. Ever since, I am keeping a tab on the Android platform and following
its feature offerings as time permits.
In the mobile development world, the release cycles are
considerably shorter than the traditional enterprise application development.
Android’ first stable version ‘Cupcake’ was released in April, 2009 and within couple
of years; we have seen many features evolved in ‘Ice Cream Sandwich – Android
SDK 4’. Éclair (v2) was better
optimized than Donut (v1.6) to take advantage of the hardware for faster
processing. Speed improvement was brought in with the
integration of Chrome V8 JavaScript engine and JIT optimization in Froyo (v2.2);
bluetooth and wi-fi made its way into the networking layer.
Gingerbread (v2.3) was
a major release and a considerable number of new features were introduced, that
include new UI themes, redesigned keyboards, new copy and paste functionality,
improved power management, NFC (Near Field Communication), support for VoIP/SIP
calls, new Camera application for accessing multiple cameras and supports
extra-large screens. Ice Cream Sandwich (v4) is much sleeker
than Gingerbread and Google has designed a font completely from the ground up,
which looks exceptional. Another major change is that a lot of the SQL handling
is moved from the native to the Java layer.
I am sure there are lots of articles on the web that will give a quick
comparison of the feature-sets that were bundled in every SDK release.
