Devs Grapple With 100+ Versions of Android

Barence writes "The scale of the challenge facing Android developers has been laid bare by Twitter client TweetDeck. During beta testing of its new software, TweetDeck encountered more than 36,000 testers using an enormous pool of 244 different handsets. Not only was hardware for the platform fragmented, but Tweetdeck had to contend with more than a hundred different versions of Android, highlighting just how muddled the market is for the open-source platform. The splintering of Android is making life difficult for app developers. 'It's not particularly harder to develop for Android over iPhone (from a programming standpoint),' said Christopher Pabon, a developer who writes apps for both the iPhone and Android platforms. 'Except when it comes to final quality assurance and testing. Then it can be a nightmare (a manageable nightmare, mind you).'"

Comments

Re:sounds to me like that you are

[SpryGuy]

This is why WP7 looks interesting to me (as both user and developer)... best of both worlds. A variety of hardware and carriers, but no glaring incompatibilies and dozens of OS versions to test on. iOS is too narrow and rigid, and Android is too chaotic and all over the place. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

differenc

[DrYak]

So how is this different to developing games/apps for the desktop (or, hell, laptop, tablet, netbook variants thereof)

well with desktop you have to support multiple OSes (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) multiple APIs and GUI toolkits (The eternal QT/KDE vs. GTK/GNOME flameware, the what's the latest iteration on Win32/COM/.NET/Xaml/etc the Microsoft decided to put forward).

with android,it's basically just one OS with a default UI tollkit. If an App doesn't make anything weird or otherwise abuse the API or hardware, it should be rather portable across a wide range of androids versions and hardware variant.

or every other phone OS other than iOS to date?.

speaking of app development on other OS, web-oriented OSes like Google ChromeOS or Palm WebOS, would probably even easier to make portable applications, as the GUI toolkit is basically just WebKit. So some problems (like variations of resolution and screensize) are even easier to handle.

Re:Objective C Java Poo

[node 3]

And it would be more capable were it written in Objective-C. Do you know that it doesn't have dynamic lighting, and that that's something that's holding up flaming arrows? Unless OpenGL in Java is more capable and that Notch has mostly just coded himself into a corner.

This isn't meant as a nock against Minecraft or Notch, or even really Java specifically, just that, all told, Objective-C provides significantly more potential than Java does. What's more important to me is that the game exists and is fun rather than how it would potentially be better if different choices were made.