Google Android Platform - The Android Log

Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post writes:

The company hasn’t said anything specific about the pricing of this bring-your-own-device service and doesn’t plan to until early next year. But McAdam did say that it would offer “very different” pricing for low-bandwidth devices like utility meters.

During the teleconference, Verizon Wireless executives also said that any phone running Google’s Android software would be welcome under this system, as long as it runs on the CDMA standard Verizon and Sprint use. For the same reason, any Sprint phone that passed Verizon’s compatibility testing would also pass muster — but the iPhone, which only works on GSM systems such as AT&T, could not.

Read the rest of the Washington Posts Article, Verizon Wireless To Open Itself Up.

Technorati Tags: Verizon, Sprint, Android, iPhone, Open-Networks

An interesting thread started in the Google Android Developers group, why hasn’t Google provided a User Interface Guide for Android? Is it up to the Android community to write these type of documents? Until recently, Free-Software has not had a celebrated history of creating outstanding GUI experiences. What will the Android experience be like if every developer has their own way of presenting user information and menu choices?

It can be a serious challenge to get hobyists and part-time free-software developers to devote precious time to the creation of style-guides and interface documents. Plus, how would a hobyist Android developer find a testing environment to study user interaction and gather feedback?

For at least six years, companies including Sun and Novell have invested heavily in improving the usability of the Gnome User Interface. The leaps and bounds that the Gnome UI has made since then is very impressive but it took money from large, established companies to create standards guides, provide testing labs and quality-control specialists. In 2001, Linux Weekly News interviewed Calum Benson about the work he was doing as a Sun employee working on the Gnome Usability Group in it’s early days.

The other critical thing is to ensure you don’t *have* to know about all the ways of doing something to complete the whole task. This problem showed up in the study with respect to panel customization, and especially fonts– there’s no one place in GNOME 1.4 to change all the fonts on your desktop, you have to know at least three different places to go.

So yes, it’s important that the key features on a desktop are well signposted, especially if you’re new to that particular environment. But while more advanced features or quicker ways of doing the same thing may not become apparent until you reach a higher level of competence and start experimenting and exploring, they still need to be designed to be
as easy to use as possible.

What kind of documentation is Android missing? Here is a small sample of similar user-interface documents that Microsoft provides independent Windows Mobile application developers.

• Accessibility and Ergonomic Guidelines - Outlines the guidelines for developing an accessible user interface.
• Home and Today Screen Guidelines - Describes the information the user might want instant access to, and ways to display it when the component is selected.
• Mobile Web Site Design Overview - Some general guidelines on how to optimize your Web site design for Internet Explorer Mobile.
• Navigation Guidelines - Describes the various views (list view, summary view, and edit view). and provides recommendations for using them.
• Screen Rotation Guidelines - Describes practical approaches you can take to create screen layouts that accommodate portrait, landscape, and square.
• Soft Key and Menu Guidelines - Describes the role that Soft Keys play in the user interface, and how to properly implement them in your applications.
• Usability Guidelines - Provides a checklist to help you confirm that your application’s user interface meets usability requirements.
• User Interface Control Guidelines - Provides guidelines for user interface (UI) controls.
• User Interface Text Guidelines - Provides guidelines for designing user interface text.

What do you think? Is this a deal-breaker for your mobile applications or is it a non-issue? 

Technorati Tags: Google, Android, User-Interface, Microsoft, Windows Mobile, Apple, Design, Guides

An update to the thread that was originally posted here, What is the Business Model for Android Developers.

After perusing the forums and thinking about google’s statements, I think that we can safely say that the direction they want us to take is toward desktop-izing this platform.  You have your staple apps that must be on every desktop, and Google wants us to hurl our ideas upon the pikes of their judges, though I might be dramatizing slightly, so that out of all the entries, a mere 50 are brought together to represent the type of things that this phone will be used for.  It’s a bit of a cheap move to pull the ‘we’ll know it when we see it’, but unrestrained innovation is the only way to truly progress.  To break in on an established industry, where players like Symbian run the arena, the OHA needs to be able to do things nobody else can, but everybody else wants to.

And really, I think that an analysis of the factors leading up to this contest will point out something.  There are 109 weekdays left before this contest closes, by my count.  This platform is brand new and the SDK is introducing new semantics and a new architecture based around VM’s housing all userspace processes, and the checks go out in that amount of time?  That is madness.  These projects will be very rushed.

Consider, though, the disparity between first and second round funding.  While Google knows that the amount of time we have isn’t enough to build an application, they also know that ‘for free’ isn’t an option for complex, world-changing ideas to develop.  Most of us are focused on the $25,000 first-round, but realistically, that is the bait.  The fifty groups funded there will now be given a chance to show fiscal responsibility, to drive their application’s development, and to use resources to achieve a goal.  After but a short period, ten receive $275,000, and ten receive $100,000.  This means that a whopping 40% of the groups who passed the first round will be funded with at least four times the first check.

For that reason, I think that what Google wants to see from us the most is a complete, mature business plan that will stably ensure that their resources will be put to the use for which they were intended. Technical competency with the Android platform is essential, and people must understand that the work put into this hardware needs to be displayed.  Applications that rely heavily on peculiarities of the internal structure of the Android platform will be leaned towards, for the precise reason that they demonstrate why it is /different/.  Its superiority can be established later, but the differences must be tangible and must surprise the users.

In short, I think it may very well be that a donations-based project could win funding.  I would think that open-source with subscription to data services, such as for remote lookups of pre-compiled data to speed the user experience, would be looked kindly upon, especially if they were well documented and served others.  I also would say that a decent library set to provide certain types of complex functionality, though it’s hard to think of any not already included, would be good as well.

~Treth

Technorati Tags: Business, Money, Google, Android, Mobile, Open-Source, Java, SDK, Developer, Development