Android 2.2 gets more and more massive. Nexus One owners have been running official Froyo for a while already, EVOs are getting the update these very days and only lazy Droid owners (out of those who care) did not upgrade their devices to 2.2 manually yet. Obviously, the rest of 2.x devices are getting Froyo quite soon as well. As developers, we are more affected by new platform versions than con... [More]

Contrary to what some inexperienced developers think, NDK is not a silver bullet for any performance problem that you face in your app. Before you make a decision to rewrite a portion of your code in C, you have to think twice. Your effort might not pay off as much as you think, as NDK is not unconditionally faster than Dalvik code. If you already spent some time learning NDK, then you know that ... [More]

If you are a Java developer interested in learning more about Android, or if you're determined you want to master that new and thriving mobile platform, chances are you have more experience working on the server side than on embedded platforms. After all, most of the success that Java has had has been concentrated around Web and Enterprise applications rather than mobile apps. (Yes, Java ME has ... [More]

If you started your mobile development on a platform like Java ME, you will probably appreciate the heap sizes that Android gives to its apps. In fact, the minimum heap size that the Android compatibility guide requires is 16 Mb, and the more typical size is 24 Mb. This seems to be large enough for a typical app, so you should rarely run into out of memory issues with simple apps. That, however, ... [More]

One of the major reasons why Java became so popular is the vast amount of existing code such as libraries, examples and open source applications, that is available to Java developers. When you develop in Java, chances are most of the "chore" code that your application needs has already been written, and good chances are that the code that you need is open source and has a flexible license. Thus, a... [More]

Android supports almost the API of Java SE almost completely (except the Swing classes and some other minor features). Among all the core classes, there is the fabulous Thread class and other concurrency-related classes of JDK 5. You are absolutely allowed to use multiple threads in your Android apps. In fact, most non-trivial apps can be challenging to implement without threads - develope... [More]