Mobile software development evolution

Yesterday was Düsseldorf's yearly Marathon and in good tradition, several runners from Vodafone tackled the full track or the famous relay run.
In 2007 I developed a J2ME application which transferred the current location from each runner to a server, so that the guys at our camp could watch the runners on Google earth.
Thursday evening I decided to implement the same functionality using today's mobile and server platforms (android and Google App Engine).
Long story short: The thing which took 5-6 days of development in 2007 (not inculding several test-runs outside) and which was still very shaky and unstable at the end, was build in 26 hours today.
Why? Mainly becasue server and client development has become so much easier. On the server side a deployment to app engine only takes minutes. In the past I had to set up my Jetty somewhere, re-configure the frontend apache, deploy a new DB to MySQL and create the schema etc...
On the client side android enables quick turn around times and most important: A stable runtime compared to the J2ME implementations which often crashed or looses connections.
The hardware of course is getting better, where in 2007 nearly no phone had GPS, I had to connect to an external one via bluetooth and implement the NMEA protocol, today's GPS location is just an API call away.
The good news: You get way more things done in less time than 4 years ago ;)

Statistics comparison

Wow, good timing for my log-file parser, Google just released more detailed statistics on the android market. You can check the device distribution of your app based on installations, so I was curious to compare them with my useage stats.
Here are the results from Google for my app:

1. Samsung Galaxy S 23.4% (128)
2. HTC Desire 20.5% (112)
3. HTC Desire HD 9.5% (52)
4. Motorola Defy 7.0% (38)
5. HTC Wildfire 6.4% (35)
6. Samsung Galaxy Tab 4.8% (26)
7. HTC myTouch 3G 3.5% (19)
8. SEMC Xperia X10 3.1% (17)
9. Motorola Droid 2.0% (11)
10. Samsung Europa 1.5% (8)

That looks quite familiar, Samsung Galaxy S and HTC Desire the top 2 devices by far, Desire HD on 3rd, then it's getting a bit messy, but in general it meets my expectations.
Will analyze the results more deeply the next days, finally Google shares some of the information they own with us.

The Android Zoo

I launched a small application on the android market some time ago and today I had the time to gather some stats from the server logs the app connects to.
I aggregated the user-agents to unique devices and to my suprise I found out that I could isolate 78 devices!
That basically means that nearly 100 different android devices have downloaded, installed & run my app. I should say that I have tested it on exactly one device before I published it ;)
I got little complaints so far therefore I expect that it works on nearly all of them. Amazing, isn't it? Compared with my J2ME experience this is just great.
I will share some rough stats with you now, but I hope to get some nice graphs in my next analytics-session.

Top 10 Device stats (request count) for the service lifetime (January 2011 until now):

1. HTC Desire (28352)
   
2. Samsung Galaxy S (24226)
3. HTC Wildfire (8471)
   
4. HTC Desire HD (8181)
5. Motorola Milestone (3831)
6. Motorola Defy (3395)
7. HTC Magic (3393)
8. HTC Legend (2730)
9. LG-P500 (2541)
10. Garmin-Asus A50 (2227)
    

I will share more details soon, like Android Version, requested data, User-Agent parsing details etc.
Stay tuned.

Sync, offline, online

Techcrunch pointed today to a side project of some googlers called Camlistore. Since the weather was great today I didn't had much time to check it out but it looks quite interesting.
As I mentioned in a previous post I still think that it's crucial for a good mobile experience to have content online AND offline availble whithout bothering the user with details.
Google contacts implementation on android is a good example. Your address book is in sync and online while you have full access to it even when you're offline.
Now it's getting of course more complicated when you're looking into things like photos or music where you want only a subset of your contents offline due to your limit storage on your mobile.
Anyway I'm curious how the guys from Camlistore proceed, it looks like the first really interesting open-source sync solution for me.

Google Maps Navigation with roaming

A short post regarding my experiences with the new google maps navigation client and offline maps.
I took the opportunity to test the praised feature of google to be able to navigate offline with the new google maps client during my latest short trip to the netherlands using my Nexus One

First try: Route to the destination from Germany (home network). I switched data roaming off and entered the destinatation. As expected everything works fine. A few kilometers behind the boarder, mobile lost data connectivity and it still had > 200 KM to go. To my suprise, routing was done perfectly to the end, sometimes map-tiles have been missing, but the routing worked well.

Second (harder) try: Route without data network back to Germany. It turned out that the client needs a data connection to generate the initial route, so I switched Data Roaming on, calculated the route, switched it off again. Again the client was able to route me back without any hickups.

Overall: Pretty good job google!

Useful Android Apps

In this post I'd like to share my experiences with useful android applications for travelling. My scenario looks like this: We planned a 3 weeks trip to Canada and I wanted to keep my roaming data as low as possible, means 0 if possible, and only rely on cached data on the SD-Card or sporadic WiFi connections.

The following Apps turned out to be very useful and worked well during this time:

• Maps: Maverick lite

I tried several Mapping applications which promised to be able to cache Map-tiles on the SD-Card. I also wanted to have support for different map-providers (Open Street Map, Google, etc.) and a comfortable way to generate & download the tiles. To make it short: Maverick lite worked perfectly, and I think I really pushed it to the extreme by pre-loading over 1 GB of tiles to the SD-card with google map tiles for car navigation and Open Street Map tiles for hiking trails in the national and provincial parks. With Mobile Atlas Creator, you can easily batch download and prepare map tiles.

• Dictionary: QuickDic

Simple & straight forward, QuickDic puts a 25MB data file on the SD-card and provides english <-> german translations for not commonly known words. Works perfect!

• Currency Converter: Currency

Works offline, and does not complain too much if there is no online connection available.

And don't forget to get some casual games for the long flight which also works in an offline situation, my recommendations are:

• Hotel Mogul lite
• Bistro Cook
• Fishin' 2 Go lite
• and of course: Flight director

Some other thoughts on offline / cached data:
Beside the fact that data roaming is horrible expensive and slow, it turned out to be really comfortable to work with offline data as it is incredible fast to access. Due to tha fact that coverage is not always given, your nice online-services will leave you lost in many areas.
No one would rely on an online-only contact list, would you? You'd like to have it synced with an online service, but cached or stored on your device as well.
I hope that we'll see more Apps, especially for maps which supports a smart & easy way to cache data on the phone.

Android on Mobile Monday

I joined the android part of the mobile monday in munich this week.

Nothing really suprising happened there, but I collected some facts from the Q/A which might be interesting for you.

• A new SDK is on the way with a complete new User Interface
• The first mobile will have a H-VGA display
• The D-BUS system will be kicked out in final release
• Applications will only be self-signed by the developer
• Minimal hardware requirements for an android platform:
• 200 Mhz ARM 9
• 64 MB RAM
• SD-Card
• QVGA or bigger
• WIFI/bluetooth

JavaFX Mobile on DevDays

Unfortunately I'm not able to join the first Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days in Santa Clara but I decided to watch the live stream of the session "Developing Applications for JavaFX Mobile" to find out a little bit more about Sun's mobile operating system.
First of all: The live stream worked really good, and there's also a chat attached to the session you're watching where you can ask questions. I took the chance to dig a bit deeper into the Web-side of the story and asked for SVG and Java PlugIn support of the WebKit based browser. Unfortunately Sun is not implementing this in their first release.... too bad. I'm wondering why they are putting so much effort on their new Java Plugin of the update N release if they don't put it into their mobile platform...
Anyway, the whole JavaFX Mobile operating system is clear competitor for android with the huge advantage that Sun is able to run 100% pure Java SE on it.
Check out the slides of that session, it's really worth it.

The android landed...

... and disperse a lot of dust in the mobile world.

My first thoughts, relatively unordered and not well consolidated...

• What a cool SDK!!! Everything you need! Very cool documentation (try the search box), Eclipse PlugIn, working samples, emulator, debugging and logging, everything for free on Window, Linux and Mac. Feel free to compare that with the
  
• WTK for JME (nearly equal)
• Symbian S60 SDK (sucks)
• Windows Mobile (not free, installs tons of crap on your PC, and so on...)
  
• iPhone SDK? (We will see...;) )
• Why have those guys re-invented all the JSRs? The only reason for me is licensing issues. Too bad for the developers.
• A pretty cool concept of handling application life cycle whiting the OS.
• I like the approach of a generic data model on the phone, I also like the idea that there are no "native" apps on the phone. Everything is Java. Looks a bit like the SavaJe idea (do you remember that?) but in cool ;)
• They build in a java - browser bridge! How cool is that?
  

Let's see where Google drive this game. Many open questions.... How will Google avoid fragmentation? What parts will really become open source? And so on and so forth...
We will see... But nevertheless, this will bring again some action to the mobile world, and changes can't be bad ;)

An android comes from outer space...

Google announced andriod today. Together with an impressive list of cooperation partners (check the open handset alliance) Google created an OS for mobile phones based on open standards (as they claim) and will open source it. There are tons of rumors out there and less facts, so it's hard to come to a conclusion right now, but somehow I have the feeling that this will be a very big (and good!) thing...
Mobile developers: Keep your fingers crossed, the SDK is coming! ;)