Google's Android Cellphone SDK Released

AchiIIe writes "The android SDK has been released to the wild. As expected it features the Linux Kernel, low level libraries such as FreeType, OpenGL, SQL Lite, WebKit (as a web browser), a custom Java Bytecode interpreter that is highly specialized for the CPU. A common java API is provided. A video has been posted with an the overview of the API." SM: Several readers have also written to mention the Android Developer Challenge offering $10 million in prizes for cool mobile apps.

Comments

Hardware?

[Andy Dodd]

What hardware platform does it run on?

"a custom Java Bytecode interpreter that is highly specialized for the CPU" - Kind of hard to do that in an emulator on a PC. What CPU is this optimized for? (Guessing ARM... Still, to evaluate performance you need real hardware.)

Re:Hardware?

[aneviltrend]

True, measuring actual current draw and temperature statistics will always require the physical hardware in question. But modern hardware simulators are able to accurately model such parameters (as well as architecture-dependent events such as cache misses) and give a good feel for the performance (both in terms of power consumption and software speed). And I'm sure an architecture as popular as ARM has several simulators for that exact purpose.

Re:Java means

[Andy Dodd]

I'm assuming (need to confirm) that Android is primarily developed using native ARM code, it just happens to include a Java VM for all those legacy MIDlets running around out there.

It would be suicide (see Palm as an example) for Google to make developing using native code difficult. (For those not in the know, even though PalmOS has run on ARM CPUs for years, normal apps are still emulated m68k code, with the option of "ARMlets" to allow snippets of native code on PalmOS 5. Writing an ARMlet is an UNHOLY NIGHTMARE. I attempted to speed up a program by replacing some code with native ARM code and gave up.)

How will Google make money on this?

[bogaboga]

Can someone tell me how Google will make money off this open source platform? Individual phone companies will create their own apps and port them to the phones. How will Google cash in? May be via ads but suppose the phone companies refuse.

Re:How will Google make money on this?

[nine-times]

It might be worth it for them just by making it hook in easily with Google ads and search.

Think about it this way: as mobile phones become more powerful and internet-ready, more people will be doing more of their casual online stuff on their phones. Right now, lots of smartphones are defaulting to Windows for their development. That means their web browsers will probably use Live search for their search engine. Phones will recommend Hotmail for anyone looking for webmail. It will become a good way for Microsoft to fight Google for online dominance.

So what's Google's way to fight back? Apple's keeping the iPhone software to themselves. Palm is basically a joke. RIM's stuff is pretty limited. Google has to build their own platform so that Nokia and Motorola will be using Google Search, Gmail, Google Apps, Blogger, etc. as a default.

So that's where the money is. That's where all Google's money comes from.

Re:How will Google make money on this?

[diegocgteleline.es]

I don't think they plan to make money from this, it just looks a way to avoid Microsoft doing in cellphones what it did in desktops.

Re:How will Google make money on this?

[hypnagogue]

Just a hint from the API: Google Maps is integrated into the framework. Thus, location-based services developed on this platform will use Google. This is no small thing -- look at the Google Maps mashups of the last several years.

As a user of Google Maps on Windows Mobile, I can tell you that the only thing broken about it is Windows Mobile. Amazing operating system, assuming you adopt the "why the heck did it just do that?" definition of "amazing". (e.g. wakes from hibernation to display the "low battery" notification)

WebKit?

[DdJ]

Holy crap, they bundled WebKit? I somehow missed that in all the hoopla.

That means that the gPhone web browser has the same rendering engine as the iPhone web browser, the one that's shared by Safari (and OmniWeb) on the desktop. It's going to get less and less safe for web developers to ignore that rendering engine...

Re:WebKit?

[ianare]

It's going to get less and less safe for web developers to ignore the standards and only code for IE... There, fixed.

So, were all the nay-sayers now?

[SmallFurryCreature]

You know who you are, the ones that said Ballmer had a point last week when he called Android a press-release. Well, here is the SDK, as promised. On time.

So will all those slashdotter who doubted eat crow now? Or will the MS fanboys just pretend this never happened, or now move on to, "all google has is a press-release, and a sdk, and an alliance".

Come on, we need some amusement here. Spin this one!

Re:So, were all the nay-sayers now?

[legirons]

"So, were all the nay-sayers now?You know who you are, the ones that said Ballmer had a point last week when he called Android a press-release. Well, here is the SDK, as promised. On time."

OpenMoko mailing lists have average 50 posts per day (and has been that way for months). They've released real hardware. There are hundreds of youtube videos demonstrating OpenMoko interface, and hundreds of people hacking on the phone. It's the only phone where hackers are tolerated, let alone welcomed.

And the biggest tech company in the world tries to compete, they come up with this? No hardware, no software, no vision, no freedom?

That marketing budget could have gone a long way towards promoting a real project.

Webkit as a powerful new platform

[605dave]

To me the most interesting aspect of the announcement was the inclusion of WebKit as the HTML rendering solution. This is a huge boon for the WebKit project, and should make many of the new iPhone web apps compatible with the new system. I'm not an expert on this, but isn't any one else surprised by the decision? Isn't Google traditionally associated with the Mozilla engine? By going with the WebKit, developers now have a target browser for Windows, Mac, the iPhone, Nokia, and now gPhone. (and there seem to be several linux projects building on it). Not to mention that the KDE group is now working to merge back in with WebKit. Sounds like a pretty strong platform for me. And an open standard that will benefit a great deal from the powerful groups working with it.

Re:worth a try..

[radimvice]

Some responses to your points:

(1) It's Java.

Java is the entrenched standard for mobile development. Google isn't pushing Java here, they're trying to maximize their reach to existing mobile developers.

(2) It's eclipse-centric.

As mentioned on their site, Google's developers use a mix of Eclipse, IntelliJ, and NetBeans for development, which is pretty much the standard in Java development. They've probably released an Eclipse plugin first because it had the broadest reach and perhaps it was the easiest environment to create a plugin for. I doubt this means that Google is pushing Eclipse, however, I would expect tutorials and documentation (if not additional plugins) to be released for the other environments soon enough.

(3) Code layout.

Code layout in package directories is pretty much a Java thing, again pretty standard.

(4) I have an iPhone.

iPhone is a single phone. Android will support a whole platform of upcoming phones. This is a big enough difference to be interested in the Android SDK at the very least, if not both. Plus, you can check out the Android SDK now while you'll have to wait until February for teh iPhone SDK.

(5) It appears to come with an emulator, which is very cool!

Yeah, it is very cool! This is also pretty standard for wireless toolkits (WTK), since development on the devices themselves is usually difficult and time-consuming. My company's suite of game development tools includes a similar universal emulator, which I love using. It's pretty much a must for mobile development.

I'm also looking very forward to playing around with the SDK. Hope some great things can come from these developments in the mobile world.

-Will

Ooops

[Andy Dodd]

The documentation isn't quite clear, but it looks like I was wrong and unfortunately Android apps are indeed intended to be written in Java. (as opposed to, say, something like a C/C++ toolkit with bindings for other languages, such as TrollTech's mobile Qt variant.)

I just lost a lot of interest in Android, if it pigeonholes developers into a single language and makes compiling native code with an efficient language difficult. Java utterly failed in the "Write once, run everywhere" arena, and it's an ugly horse-designed-by-committe language that universally leads to bloat. (See, for example, the memory usage and UI responsiveness of uTorrent when compared with Azureus.) There's a big focus on mobile devices towards multimedia applications (video, audio), and smooth video playback on a phone takes even natively compiled code to its limits.

Re:Ooops

[LWATCDR]

Using Java doesn't cause lock you into a single language. The JVM could be targeted by any number of languages all you need is a compiler that will output the correct bytecode.
Going with a JVM is the only logical way to go with this kind of system. You don't want the end user to have to compile the application for their phone and yow don't want to have recompile a for each new cell phone that hits the market.

Re:This cannot be true!

[Creepy]

Not to be the rationalist when you're clearly poking fun of Mr Nervous (Ballmer), but at the time he said that (in a press conference last Thursday in Tokyo) he was right - there really wasn't much info out there, and a lot of the speculation was wrong. Today was the first release of any hard info and SDK, but they still haven't released any performance numbers and it still doesn't run on any existing handset (at least publicly).

Google does have a strong corporate backing, however, including companies that are currently customers of Microsoft and Symbian, so from their standpoint, they need to bash it and promote their own solutions. Expect a lot more to come.

Re:Android will start the Java tornado on devices

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the the single best possibe thing that could have happened for the success of Java on devices. This SDK will be decisive for how software will be written for the masses in the future: With Java. Mobile Java *did* have a success. People realized it and it's now ubiquitous.

Don't forget: The number of mobile phone users without a PC will soon be an order of magnitude higher than the number of PC users. That also has already happened.

Re:Not very exciting

[Goaway]

Thanks ever so much for the feature-checklist defense. That's the exact thing that is holding phone development back - the inability to see past the feature list that says "MP3 player!" and realize that that MP3 player is clumsy and unusable.

The iPhone is breaking new ground exactly because it is prettier, smoother and more friendly. That is what I was talking about from the start.