This post is written as a reaction on Christoffer Du Rietz’s article The Android Hardware-Buttons Are Broken. In his article Christoffer explains how the Android back button shows inconsistent behavior like doing different actions when it is used on the same screen.In the following article I will try to explain that this behavior is not broken. Instead it is exactly what the Android developers had in mind while designing the back button behavior.The way the back button is broken according to ChristofferChristoffer’s example case is the Twitter application. In scenario 1 he is doi...

Repairs to Android smartphones cost wireless carriers $2 billion per year according to a new year-long WDS study that tracked 600,000 support calls around the globe. Android’s popularity and the introduction of a number of low-cost smartphones has put a strain on the wireless business model, WDS noted in its report. “Deployment by more than 25 OEMs and lower-cost product coming to market is leading to higher than average rates of hardware failures and, in turn, return and repair costs.” 12.6% of all technical support calls related to Android in the study were for hardware fa...

We’ve heard a lot about Android’s popularity; it’s a machine that’s clearly outpacing its rivals like Apple’s iOS… in market share. It seems that, although Android is super popular and great at attracting customers, it loses support from other parties that are vital to the success of the OS, like developers.Why does Android have such a hard time winning over developers? More importantly, how can they win over the developers? Well, let’s take a quick look at the state of Android for developers right now.Bigger Is Not Better?The iOS App Store is mu...

Mobile devices of the first generation were not capable of playing any sounds except monophonic ringtones. Today any smartphone platform supports playback, record and to some extent manipulation of digital sound, often up to CD quality.Android is no exception to that. Even older 1.5 devices can do a lot of things with digital audio. However, due to lack of guidance, a developer who is doing his first audio feature might miss some of the available API facilities, or might choose the approach that is not optimal to her use case. This article is supposed to clarify the three major APIs for workin...

In a previous post, I mentioned how user-friendly Android is for developers. There’s extensive documentation and information on the architecture, the different components and best practices. However, the documentation has a few blind spots. Many of the tools have little documentation and no usage examples. The information is there, it’s just hidden behind a few layers of Android theory.So I’m going to try and document a few of the basic things that you’ll probably need to know to start developing Android applications. Only for beginners and intermediate Android...