Since I got my HTC Hero Android phone, somewhere last august, I’ve been coding for it on and off. Now, in November I got a bunch of unfinshed Android projects and I’ve decided to actually finish one :)
Coding for Android has really been a pleasant experience. The platform is more open than any other mobile device that I ever worked with, the tools integrate OK with Eclipse, it has a nice architecture and, most importantly, I can code for it in the language I love and know: Java.
But building an application for a mobile device is still challenging. All of a sudden you need to be aware that resources aren’t unlimited in the mobile world. There are constraints on the amount of memory, object allocation, cpu speed, battery use etc that you suddenly get confronted with. For a Java developer this might be going back to the old days, especially when you come from a JEE background where the trend is to not think about these things and let your frameworks handle all of the heavy lifting.
I like thinking about the heavy lifting actually. I like to see what’s going on, so that I can be sure that it works and understand it. That’s one of the reasons that I like Android.