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Why not work on an Android App of some kind? Download the Android SDK! It's free, the Eclipse development environment is free, and the SDK even has a really nice emulator so you can run your Apps even if you don't have an Android phone.

Wake up. There is native x86 NDK in the Android SDK. No need to emulate ARM native code. This has been true since last summer.

Android is not GPL, it's Apache:

http://source.android.com/source/licenses.html

The linux Kernel is a different matter but this is an Android code change, not a Linux one. Intel doesn't have to release anything, ever.

Why are people constantly quoting the GPL? Android is NOT GPL, it uses the Apache license. The linux Kernel is GPL, of course, but this isn't about a linux improvement, it's about an Android improvement. Android code means Intel doesn't have to release anything, ever.

Considering that Intel is very much the underdog when it comes to Android (So far there's been one Intel powered Android phone on the market and it's very much a budget offering - a good one, but it's not going to take on the legions of ARM devices any time soon), pushing code that gives their competitors an advantage doesn't make a lot of business sense, at least not until they've established a good foothold.

it's impossible to do an Android app without using Java

The Android NDK lets you write code in C/C++. http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html

Seriously Slashdot, bring out the nerds. There is so much incorrect information in this thread getting modded up. Hold the obligatory "you must be new here" jokes.

And just like iOS, it's impossible to do an Android app without using Java

Really. Seriously? You really mean that? I thought you could write native apps for Android too if you wanted.

Yes, you can. There are two ways to go about it:

Download the Android SDK which contains an Android emulator.

If you have any virtualization software installed, grab an Android x86 ISO image and run it in a VM.

The second method gets you higher performance (virtualization vs binary translation), but has major compatibility issues. Any app that contains ARM native code won't work in Android x86 unfortunately.

Google is breaking the Java "contract" with developers: portability.

I'd be much more (read: nonzero) sympathetic to that position if Google didn't explicitly state that their binaries run on Dalvik, and not the JVM:

Android includes a set of core libraries that provides most of the functionality available in the core libraries of the Java programming language.

Every Android application runs in its own process, with its own instance of the Dalvik virtual machine. Dalvik has been written so that a device can run multiple VMs efficiently. The Dalvik VM executes files in the Dalvik Executable (.dex) format which is optimized for minimal memory footprint. The VM is register-based, and runs classes compiled by a Java language compiler that have been transformed into the .dex format by the included "dx" tool.

The Dalvik VM relies on the Linux kernel for underlying functionality such as threading and low-level memory management.

But seeing as how cross-platform compatibility isn't a stated goal or feature of Java The Language on Android, that's all totally irrelevant to the situation at hand. Suppose someone implemented Python on a non-CPython VM. Your logic would imply that the Python Software Foundation should be able to sue them for breaking cross-platform .pyc compatibility. That's ludicrous.

Sun basically said that anyone could use the code so long as they DIDN'T call it Java. It's like the IceWeasel / Firefox thing. They have no choice. So not illegal, and not really immoral.

You have to decide. Either they could not use the Java name, and in this case they are MASSIVELY infringing, as their code / documentation / web sites contain thousands of times the word "Java", including the Android frontpage, or they can use it, and your justification of Google's sneaky behaviour does not hold.

Of course they can use the damn word if they refer to the language that you can write Android programs in. They just can't call their runtime in which they run the compiled programs "Java" or a "JVM". And they don't -- they call it "Dalvik". And they've written it themselves. And that's perfectly legal. Of course you don't have to pay license fees anytime you you the word "Java" in any technical sense. If you want, you can write a Java Framework for controlling a spacecraft or a coffee machine, brag "you can write programs for it in JAVA" in the documentation, sell it for thousands of dollars and not pay Oracle anything.

The fact is, that they knew they needed a Java ME license

What? They didn't need one at all unless they wanted to provide a Java ME implementation, which would be a completely different thing. Do you even know what Java ME is? It's a spec defining a subset of J2ME plus lots of additional APIs, profiles and so on. Android doesn't contain any of that.

Java ME's licensing model is of course designed to be impossible to work around, as the company that created it had this crazy aspiration to make money out of it.

What kind of warped statement is that? This is like saying the copyright on "Titanic" is impossible to work around because James Cameron wanted to make money. Knock it off, man.

Sun basically said that anyone could use the code so long as they DIDN'T call it Java. It's like the IceWeasel / Firefox thing. They have no choice. So not illegal, and not really immoral.

You have to decide. Either they could not use the Java name, and in this case they are MASSIVELY infringing, as their code / documentation / web sites contain thousands of times the word "Java", including the Android frontpage, or they can use it, and your justification of Google's sneaky behaviour does not hold.

Of course they were circumventing the need to have a Java ME license. That's not the issue, and not illegal. The question is, did they circumvent it properly, or did they get caught on the snags of not doing a proper job of it (i.e. can ANYONE make something Java-like or even use Java code without stepping on things that are IMPOSSIBLE to work around?). This is within the realm of reverse-engineering and IP-skirting. You don't want to pay for their patents, so you work to AVOID them instead. Again, hardly illegal or even immoral.

The fact is, that they knew they needed a Java ME license (Java SE didn't have licensing problems, but it wasn't technically appetible for them). Java ME's licensing model is of course designed to be impossible to work around, as the company that created it had this crazy aspiration to make money out of it. And Google decided NOT to pay for the license. "Immoral" does not belong to my vocabulary; a judge will decide if this is illegal.

The GPL thing? They didn't want to use GPL code. Simple as that. Nor do quite a few huge companies. That's their choice. And rather than that just plain infringe GPL code or get the GPL taken down in a court. Again - they didn't want to do something, their only legal avenue was to find an alternative and work around the problem. They can licence their own code under whatever license they want and they can start from ANY licence or licenced code that they choose as a basis to start from. Not illegal, not immoral.

My point never was that Google had to use GPL code or that not using GPL code is illegal, you're creating a magistral straw man argument. The point is that Google, a company that builds for itself an exterior image of an open source supporter, who has made billions by leveraging GPL-licensed code, calls the obligation to release a product's source code "an infection". Just like Microsoft. This is not illegal, by all means, it's just disappointing, hypocritical, or, in Google-speak, "evil".

Now, if it were Microsoft? I think they'd avoid the GPL like a plague too. Google didn't make up their own "open" licence though, that's basically useless for anyone trying to contribute, which Microsoft have in the past. And MS have DEFINITELY avoided using certain trademarked names (and tried to enforce trademarks on things like Windows in the past, etc.) and DEFINITELY worked around patents that others owned rather than licence them (their Office suite comes to mind).

(In your comparison, you forgot getting fined for impeding investigations and for privacy violation.) Are you trying to convince me that Google have become as "evil" as Microsoft? That was the main point of my post, actually.

The question really is, where's your bias come from?

I get called "a shill", "a sockpuppet", "a astroturfer" after almost any post I write on Slashdot. I got accused of being paid, among others, by Apple, Nokia, Sony... and Google. I take it with pride as I think it means that I'm doing something minimally useful to prevent Slashdot from becoming an useless echo chamber. Most people understand what kind of communities accuse the dissenters of being "the enemy".

In spite of the sunk cost of Davlik, I think at this point it would be better for Google to simply deprecate Java and tell developers that new development will happen in some other language (like Dart, python, whatever). They could continue to support the Java API indefinitely, but give new apps all the new features and optimisation. Android has had a lot of stick for being a slow, unpolished platform, and this is an opportunity to ditch some of that reputation, at the same time as ditching an unwilling partner (Oracle) who obviously doesn't appreciate what Google have done for Java with Android. The alternative doesn't bear thinking about - constant antagonism with the management of the language standard they are using. If Oracle loses this case they will not take it lying down - expect other moves against Google in the future, hell, even if they win I expect they'd come back for more at some later date. Oracle is obviously in a death spiral and determined to take the rest of the world with it - Apple has also ditched them recently, it seems because of friction with Oracle and new licensing terms, so it's not as if this is going to get better.

Java has caused Google serious issues with performance on a mobile platform anyway - they'd be better off with a language and platform that they control entirely. Unfortunately changing the platform like this would be a huge wrench and would have to be managed very carefully over a period of years, but it can be done.

You are 100% right about the Android Device ID but is less of a privacy concern than the ESN, IMEI, etc that is protected by READ_PHONE_STATE. It is randomly generated, and can change with factory reset or by means of root access. The use of the Android Device ID for the purpose of tracking app installations is clearly supported behavior with the caveats I mention outlined.

Worry #1 is probably not that devastating a concern. The Google platform distribution shows only 0.3% of users are running 1.5 or below at this point. It is my experience that few apps support Cupcake and below.

Did Google do an Embrace Extend of Java?

http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.html

They say its Java, but android applications are incompatible with the official Java standard.

Wonder what the fanboys would say if this was MS doing it...

This is IF Google permanently closed the source and if you wanted to completely fork the platform and carry it forward.

Your comment gave the impression that you were concerned with the delays seen with ICS, not that they would permanently discontinue releases. The latter is just unfounded speculation and could just as easily occur with any open source project that requires copyright assignment. It has nothing to do with the development model.

And since I last looked, all development happens internally to Google and between their partners. AOSP is a one-way dumping ground for the sources.

The latest version is developed behind closed doors, ostensibly so that Apple and other competitors can't just copy all their new ideas before they even release the next version, and so that Chinese manufacturers don't sell millions of devices with pre-test code on them just to have the latest version.

Once a major revision is published, smaller updates are released to the public and you can submit your own patches upstream. If you add something worthwhile to the latest public release, I have a hard time imagining that it won't get ported to the next version.

I'm honestly surprised Java is even a choice for Android. Most people write in C++ afaik. http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.html

Just in this thread I picked up that it's: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/renderscript/index.html

At this point, with the release of Android 4.0, legacy devices account for 60% of all Android devices in use.

Coincidentally, it's all the devs that needs 3D Rendering.

I somehow doubt that.

The native Renderscript API is clean, device-independant and performs well. http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/renderscript/index.html. The people having difficulty are only the ones coming from iOS to other platforms.

In reality, what's happened is that Google, recognising the need for larger apps and data, has increased the size of downloads from the Market as Expansion files. They did this so they could track when large in-game downloads were completing, because unscrupulous dvelopers were using large/slow downloads to make sure the user had no opportunity to finish the download before the refund period expired. Now the Market tracks that the user has completely finished downloading large applications, then starts the refund period. Most newer devices should download expansion files automatically, but older ones download them when you first run the application.

Say what? Depending on your device, you've gotta run the app to get the expansion packs in the first place because the market doesn't push the expansion files. OTOH if the market /were/ responsible for pushing and installing the expansion files, wouldn't that make it easier for Google to track and then determine when your grace period should start? Conversely, why on earth would Google include the download time in your grace period?

Seems a bit archaic to me, because instead of having a single place to deal with updates, you've now got two. Instead of one bit of code to maintain (market app on the phone) there are now two (market app and the developer's app) that need to handle essentially identical tasks. Scratch that, it seems a lot archaic and like there are far more permutations to deal with than in iOS land.

Sad to say, Windows Mobile 6.x is the only game in town if you are interested in anything remotely related to software freedom.

What a weird thing to say, given Microsoft's history.

You can get the full source code for Android here http://source.android.com/.

There's a repository of FOSS Android apps here http://f-droid.org/, it has a market-style installer to make it easy.

The full SDK is here http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html, and there's an O'Reilly Cookbook available http://androidcookbook.com/home.seam.

If Java/Davlik coding is beyound you, try MIT's very clever App Inventor RAD http://appinventoredu.mit.edu/what-is-app-inventor. It's quite cool.

Note that all of these resources are gratis, and most are free as well.

Sad to say, Windows Mobile 6.x is the only game in town if you are interested in anything remotely related to software freedom.

What a weird thing to say, given Microsoft's history.

You can get the full source code for Android here http://source.android.com/.

There's a repository of FOSS Android apps here http://f-droid.org/, it has a market-style installer to make it easy.

The full SDK is here http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html, and there's an O'Reilly Cookbook available http://androidcookbook.com/home.seam.

If Java/Davlik coding is beyound you, try MIT's very clever App Inventor RAD http://appinventoredu.mit.edu/what-is-app-inventor. It's quite cool.

Note that all of these resources are gratis, and most are free as well.

Android is heavily GPL as is the software ecosystem.

Android is not "heavily GPL". The kernel is GPL and everything else is Apache 2.0 or other permissive licenses with very few exceptions if any. You would have a really hard time getting anything (L-)GPL in the Android userland by Google's own preferred licensing.

the GPL was the very worst thing that ever happened to linux -- it isolated and emasculated the platform in one easy step.

And in one fell swoop, the troll is slain. Emasculated indeed. ha

I don't see a port of Eclipse any time soon

If you want Eclipse so you can write Android apps on your Android device, you can always use this. With that you can write java cli apps or regular Android apps all day long on your TF.

Or just use PDroid, you can restrict permissions easily and apps WONT crash...

• Root your Android
• Get Gemini App Manager (Or something else that can change auto run permissions per event)
• Get Permissions to actually change permissions.
• Watch the apps crash since not obtaining the permissions is a fatal error.

• Root your Android
• Get Gemini App Manager (Or something else that can change auto run permissions per event)
• Get Permissions to actually change permissions.
• Watch the apps crash since not obtaining the permissions is a fatal error.

Android phones in the U.S. come with apps that cannot be deleted, depending on the service. Typically: Facebook, Twitter. You can choose to decline updates, but you cannot remove the app. Look at the comments on this app: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.virginmobileusa.vmlive&hl=en Of them 90% are along the lines of this one: "This program is garbage I wish I could get this crap off my phone."

root + titanium backup deletes everything...

Android phones in the U.S. come with apps that cannot be deleted, depending on the service. Typically: Facebook, Twitter. You can choose to decline updates, but you cannot remove the app. Look at the comments on this app: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.virginmobileusa.vmlive&hl=en Of them 90% are along the lines of this one: "This program is garbage I wish I could get this crap off my phone."

I'm a fan of yours generally but WTF?

Hate to disappoint you, but we've had VNC on Android devices already for yonks. Thanks for playing.

Well then, I'd like to call in a mob on Booyah games' "Early Bird" for Android. It hasn't happened so far, it ought to.

They had a paid version, then they made it free - and added advertising. I wouldn't mind if they made a free version with ads (or even a free version without ads), but they effectively force-downgraded the version I paid for.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.booyah.birds

According to the phone in my pocket, Google is the only choice of a search engine on that device thanks to a fundamental conflict of interest between the Android part of Google and the search part of Google.

according to the android phone in my pocket, I can still bing through the google broswer and the bing app. unless it was really google search with different skin.....oh wait.

Not only is Bing not copying search results from Google, you missed the point of my post entirely.
The Verizon phone locked to Bing does not actually block Google web searches either, it's just that the default search provider (for the main search widget, for example) is locked to Bing (and on nearly every other Android phone, Google).

According to the phone in my pocket, Google is the only choice of a search engine on that device thanks to a fundamental conflict of interest between the Android part of Google and the search part of Google.

according to the android phone in my pocket, I can still bing through the google broswer and the bing app. unless it was really google search with different skin.....oh wait.

This game is pretty good and well worth the $4.99.

After trying to use Google Maps and/or the Phoenix Metro time schedule when I took my son on the Phoenix Metro Light Rail (which he absolutely loves riding), I gave up and just scraped the data and wrote my own application (iOS app and Android app). The biggest issue I had was that the schedule data is badly done. They only have the times for half the stations (14 out of 28), so I had to interpolate for the remaining stations and call it good enough

Damn it. I forgot to log in before replying.

After trying to use Google Maps and/or the Phoenix Metro time schedule when I took my son on the Phoenix Metro Light Rail (which he absolutely loves riding), I gave up and just scraped the data and wrote my own application (iOS app and Android app). The biggest issue I had was that the schedule data is badly done. They only have the times for half the stations (14 out of 28), so I had to interpolate for the remaining stations and call it good enough

Install a terminal emulator and a copy of busybox and you can have a bash scripting environment on android.

Install a terminal emulator and a copy of busybox and you can have a bash scripting environment on android.

... I would love to be able to text on my smartphone without looking ....

There are a few speech to text apps out there that will allow you to do that: ShoutOut, Sonalight Text by Voice and VLingo Virtual Assistant

... I would love to be able to text on my smartphone without looking ....

There are a few speech to text apps out there that will allow you to do that: ShoutOut, Sonalight Text by Voice and VLingo Virtual Assistant

... I would love to be able to text on my smartphone without looking ....

There are a few speech to text apps out there that will allow you to do that: ShoutOut, Sonalight Text by Voice and VLingo Virtual Assistant

at least you have the meaning of "pointless noise making" down pat.

https://market.android.com/search?q=pointless+noises&c=apps gives 45 results.

My android tablet has a few pointless noise making apps, but those are all free, and it's just not the same unless I'm wasting money on them.

What an obvious Apple shill you are - https://market.android.com/search?q=fart&c=apps says there are at least a 1000 fart apps on the Android Market alone, and on the first page there are already 3 paid apps.

Market is dependant on meeting the requirements. GAPPS is separate, and needs a license. I actually thought the same thing a few months back, before someone corrected me.

http://source.android.com/faqs.html#if-i-am-not-a-manufacturer-how-can-i-get-android-market

http://source.android.com/faqs.html#how-can-i-get-access-to-the-google-apps-for-android-such-as-maps

Market is dependant on meeting the requirements. GAPPS is separate, and needs a license. I actually thought the same thing a few months back, before someone corrected me.

http://source.android.com/faqs.html#if-i-am-not-a-manufacturer-how-can-i-get-android-market

http://source.android.com/faqs.html#how-can-i-get-access-to-the-google-apps-for-android-such-as-maps

This has to be about the most clueless advice I've ever read about how to build a better tablet. First of all, just about everything the author mentions already exists and has existed for years with Windows tablet pcs. Speech and handwriting recognition, having a filesystem, and the nebulous "The filesystem is the CMS is the PIM is the email client" already existed or could have easily have been built into the existing tablet pc ecosystem. If those are the features you really care about, why not just buy a laptop or netbook?

At no point in this article does the author acknowledge the importance of the defining features of tablets, namely that they should be portable, have good battery life, have a good screen and have a responsive and well designed touch interface. I consider these to be pretty much the essential basics when it comes to any tablet that hopes to be widely successful. Yet, going on two years later, almost no other company has succeeded in integrating these features into a compelling product despite having a template to work from. iOS itself is not that ambitious an OS. It's actually not the flashiest or most eye-candy-laden OS out there -- not by a a long shot. It doesn't even have the most intuitive user interface all the time. But for core tablet functionality, it is extremely good and is perhaps still unmatched in the industry.

You have to understand how the features of a tablet all work together to support the overall use-cases that you designed the tablet for. So if it is a tablet whose defining features are: (1) not having a keyboard, (2) probably held and used while standing up or lying down, (3) may spend prolonged time outside of the home or away from an outlet, (4) will be used under varying lighting conditions, then why do we see so many tablets these days that are bulky, heavy, have poor screens, and poor keyboards? I don't get that. This is working against your own best interest. Now, there are a lots of tablets that do more than an ipad in a technical sense but since they are such poor tablets they don't differentiate themselves sufficiently from a netbook or laptop to justify the costs.

I think if Microsoft or any company wants to beat Apple at making a better tablet then they need to acknowledge the unique constraints and opportunities of the form factor they are working with. Add features that truly leverage the benefits of a portable device. Aim for a battery life of 15+ hours. This is more than a whole workday because it gives you leeway in case you forget to recharge the device overnight from the previous 'whole day' of work. Find a good balance for security that sits somewhere between the locked down iTunes Appstore and the Android Market. Apps need not be rejected on silly grounds like conformance to a style guide or ease of use but they damn well better not be obvious malware or trojans. With the resources that these companies have it their disposal, how hard can it be to run each app in a sandbox with a monkey-like testing environment and monitor for anomalous outgoing connections to China or some place?

Every one of the major competitors to Apple have lots of cash on hand, well into the billions. If one is serious about tablets, why not buy up or seriously invest in every company that is trying to build reflective screen technology? There are whole classes of use-cases related to the outdoors that are poorly served by any tablet today. Shit, at a minimum, whoever gets this right can crash the ebook market which is a pretty significant market in itself.

Perhaps, I am a fool and this is not as easy as I think, but I never said it was easy anyway. And yet, the problem can't be money since Apple did not have the billions upon billions of revenue that it has now when it was designing the ipad. They just had a very clear idea of the device they were working on and what its purposes were. To this point, Amazon with its

This is what's great about LBE Privacy Guard (requires root).

When an app requests contact info, location data, etc. LBE gives the usual warning up. The difference is when you say no, LBE feeds the app dummy information rather than directly block thus avoiding the force close issues that plague other implementations.

On Android it shouldn't even need a root. Just install a custom launcher app that will only launch the required application. There's even a sample in the SDK that you can use as a starting point.

Instead of creating your own browser as other people have suggested, you can use an existing app: Kiosk Browser HC, and for a little price (after all you won't pay that so that shouldn't be a worry) there's an improved version: Kiosk Browser SE.

According to the version of the OS and if you can root the tablets or not, that might be all that you need, but if there's some other requirement then check SureLock Kiosk Lockdown

Instead of creating your own browser as other people have suggested, you can use an existing app: Kiosk Browser HC, and for a little price (after all you won't pay that so that shouldn't be a worry) there's an improved version: Kiosk Browser SE.

According to the version of the OS and if you can root the tablets or not, that might be all that you need, but if there's some other requirement then check SureLock Kiosk Lockdown