ECMASOFT - Publications
Android Development
In November of 2007 Google announced a contest «Android Developer Challenge» with a $10 million prize fund.
The task for participants was to develop the best application for mobile phones. All kinds of applications were acceptable but innovativeness and utility of developing applications were in favor.
Social networks, operating with information (e.g. pictures), å-mail, IM/calendar, games, news, re-thinking of interface are among the spheres of the application development.
The registration of participants was held from January, 2nd to April 14th at code.google.com
Initial Code.
On the October, 21 2008 the OHA alliance published the initial code of Android platform. The release contained the entire riding crop Android: and operating system, and middleware, and applications written in Java. The total size of the initial code is 2.1 Gbyte.
Preferential license of Android initial code is Apache License 2.0.
The initial code is now available at source.android.com
Critics.
The platform is based on Java; therefore the advantages and capabilities of Linux are not used. For example, none of the graphic toolkits and libraries (e.g. Qt or GTK) is used. That makes the new application appearance impossible, especially those that can be Linux desktop integrated.
There is information that Google will delete applications as it thinks fit, if the conditions of their usage are broken.
The applications are unable to be installed on a memory card. That drawback can be significant if the phone has a small amount of embedded memory (T-Mobile G1 has only 70 Mbyte)