So I finally got my first Andoid app out there; an SSH app as I had in mind earlier. I spent my time tinkering with the console output (it was somehow lost when I used two background threads instead of one, but could never grasp why), then formatting of the console colors took some time, then I couldn't get HTML to play nice with Android's TextView so I had to rewrite to use a visitor pattern on the TextView's Spannable (blargh) and finally some carriage return-moves-to-beginning-of-line nonsense. It's usable for the most basic stuff, but hardly. It does not have arrow keys, it does not have a tab key easily accessible. I cut down on development time by separating the input field from the console itself, in the process causing some random editing bugs which I won't bother to fix.
My first run (on my mother-in-law's 1.5 year-old Samsung) caused a crash, which I later identified as an Android bug which Google had fixed in the later version I was running on the emulator.
So far, fragmentation was far worse than I had anticipated. It's just as bad as
Jobs said, and it's by far the worst part of Android. I guess that's what you get when you have some
different devices, yielding 62,442 target platforms when multiplied by 18 different "API levels".
The most surprising flaw of Android, from a non-developer perspective, is that it still looks… shockingly repugnant. The default views, buttons, the layout, the margins, color choices, borders, shapes, shades – yes pretty much everything – looks like it was unequivocally designed by an ox.
Surprisingly good was the Google Play release cycle. My first
only took two hours; I probably spent the double on my first App Store release. To be fair, you feel more obliged on App Store where there's quality all around. Also, when the app crashed (on my mother-in-laws Dumb Phone) I was able to submit the crash log - including call stack - to my Google Play account, which I could pick up and fix whenever. That was pretty neat, I must admit. Plus Android is cheaper. Android-iOS 2-2000.
Here's the app.
Here's the sauce.
