For Android Users, 2012 Is Still the Year of Gingerbread

First time accepted submitter brocket66 writes with this excerpt from BGR: "Three major revisions of Google's Android operating system have launched since the company released Android 2.3 more than 21 months ago in December 2010, but Gingerbread is still the most widely used version of Android by a wide margin. A study conducted early this year by graphic designer Chris Sauve projected that based on Android adoption trends up to that point, Android 2.3 Gingerbread would be the dominant version of Android in 2012 despite the fact that Android 3.0 Honeycomb and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich had already been released. Now, as the fourth quarter of 2012 approaches, data from Google's Android version distribution tracker confirms once again that those projections were accurate."

Comments

Re:So?

[AuMatar]

And sadly, I don't think that the platform vendor is keeping up. I've recently started heavily writing my own reusable components, with the idea of spitting out a lot of small easy apps (to try and force myself to think in those terms, since I usually dream up giant multi-month efforts). Some of the things I had to write myself were ridiculously common, yet every damn dev is writing their own.

*Splash screen (and side note: the tutorials I found on the web on how to make one were all horrible, involving spawning threads and making sleep calls).
*Intents to just play full screen video, or audio and matching image.
*An Image widget that can use a resource or a URL as the source.
*A wrapper around their gyroscope and accelerometer to form a compass sensor. Something they used to have (ORIENTATION_SENSOR) then deprecated.
*A single function call method to get a URL as a string (or as an image, etc).
*A view that displays the output of the camera, and manages requesting access to the camera when the activity is paused/unpaused. Really, how the hell did they miss this?
*A JSON parsing library that will take JSON and an object definition and use reflection to turn the JSON into a java object.

Really, most of these are extremely common. Most aren't that hard, only the compass took significant time, and that because I needed to figure out the linear algebra and then clean up the sensor data. But google isn't providing it, and there aren't any good common Android libraries so everyone is rewriting most of these. And sure, some of these have limited use, but there's still ridiculous amounts of time being wasted by rewriting these thousands of times. Give us better tools to get out jobs done quickly, and we might have time to play with more advanced features.