Sunday, April 29, 2012

Android SDKs - Cupcake to Ice Cream Sandwich


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.

           iOS leads the way with quality apps, Android leads in market share; Windows phone has not caught up yet with the mass adoption as its leading competitors. Android and iOS — each offers its own clear take on the mobile OS experience, and I personally feel that the consumers and business users stand to benefit from this healthy competition. Staying tuned on what Android comes up with next …………………

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