Apart from the huge success with devices sold the conference kicked of with the statement that iOS is still ahead in terms of commercial success. There are several factors for that: People are spending more money on iPhone apps because they want to impress, Apple has become the synonym for apps („there’s an app for that“), and iPhone users are rather early adopters. Also purchasing is fully integrated on iOS and the payment information has to be provided once you set up an iTunes account. On the other hand transparency and privacy could become a competitive advantage for Android. Especially app developers have to keep that in mind and enhance user trust and be transparent.

If you are interested in a smartphone that puts social values first, you should definitely check out FairPhone. It’s still a concept and under development but we think it’s definitely time to have more ethically sourced and manufactured devices!

When it comes to the Do’s and Dont’s for Android UI you should have a look at Android UI Patterns. Probably the best advice for every Android UX engineer is „Don’t use designs from other platforms“. The time when just imitating the iOS user interface on Android was state-of-the-art is definitely long over. „Make you layout scalable and don’t build an extra app for tablets“ is another very important guideline – here re-usable Fragments are the way to go.

On a rather technical level there were a lot of interesting talks as well. Anders Göransson of Jayway talked about efficient threading on Android. When scheduling processes on Android you have to consider the four different levels: 1. Foreground, 2. Visible, 3. Service, 4. Background. It’s important to know that background threads get only 10% of execution time. The garbage collector (GC) runs after the onDestroy() method of an Activity, so having background threads that reference Activities is in all likelihood a source for a memory leak. You can read more about this topic at the official developer guide.

Markus Junginger of greenrobot from Munich talked about the lessons learned with Prime Guide, their Android TV guide app for the German market. Apart from the daily struggles of an Android developer he argued about the pros and cons of using Google App Engine (GAE) as the backend of the app. A technology which we are using for our products as well. It might not be the cheapest solution and has it’s weak points, but on the other hand GAE helps them to have high availability with close to zero maintenance effort, easy version control and – most imporant – getting them through usage peaks easily.

Another central theme throughout the conference was how to build high quality apps and what tools and techniques can be used for quality assurance. Just to mention a few:

• Jenkins: for continuous integration (CI), automated build and device tests
• Robolectric: a unit test framework
• Mockito: a mocking framework that can be used for unit tests
• Calabash: write automated functional and acceptance test with Cucumber
• Robotium: test automation framwork
• Sonar: manage code quality (code coverage, source analysis, …)

Testing is very important but quality should start at an earlier stage when developing, so dependency injection (DI) is an important concept to keep the code clean, managable and readable. On Android, RoboGuice – the Android variant of Google’s Guice framework – comes in handy. If you are developing serious Android apps you should definitely use the well known obfuscator and code shrinker ProGuard to reduce application size, increase performance and battery life. Hint: You need to enable it, by default it’s commented out in the project.properties file.

Some other interesting topics: Philipp Kandal of skobbler talked about the „Top Ten Monetization hacks on Android“, and Facebook introduced their brand new Android SDK version 3.0.1. Mozilla showcased their new operating system Firefox OS to the crowd – the OS itself is based on the Android kernel but everything is written in HTML5/CSS/JavaScript. Mozilla promotes open standards and a web ecosystem opposed to the „silos“ of Google, Apple and Microsoft.

Another talk was about the disillusion of building HTML5 apps on Android. Javascript frameworks like Sencha Touch and JQuery Mobile in combination with Cordova/PhoneGap promise to let you develop cross platform web apps with less effort, but in reality this often turns out as wishful thinking. Of course there is a place and a use case for mobile web-apps, but the customer as well as the developer have to know the limitations well. There seems to be a bright spot in the future for HTML5 apps, as performance and CPU power continues to increase on mobile devices, but as of today hybrid apps combining native and web seem to be a more realistic path to success.

We are definitely keen on using our Android know-how and skills in customer projects and will be happy to help you realize your Android app. We are looking forward to seeing new developments in the Android and mobile sphere in 2013!

Here is what we’ve found interesting:

PhoneGap, the famous HTML5 WebApp framework is now owned by Adobe and renamed to Cordova. Phonegap/Cordova 1.5 is now also an Apache Incubator project and you can use it free of charge under the Apache License. This framework is the way to go if you want to build HTML5 apps. Whatever IDE you’d like best, there is support for Eclipse or MS Visual Studio. When building a WebApp with Phonegap, the core www folder of the project that contains the app logic will always remain the same.

The guys from Telecom Labs (T-Labs) presented Magitact, a cool new way to interact with your smartphone without even touching the screen. Magnetic gestures do the trick. Though still in beta, very impressive app showcases (play guitar strings, drum apps).

LG presented their Real3D SDK, which enables developers to build real 3D screen content (cool for games, we think). Of course you need special smartphone hardware to display the 3D: we saw the 3D content on the LG Optimus 3D Max Android smartphone. BTW, LG clearly favours Android (around 10 Android smartphones, 1 Windows Mobile smartphone out there).

Christian Kurzke from Google pointed out, that GoogleTV needs a very different UX/UI design compared to smartphone or Tablet apps, in oder to be useable on TV sets. Just think about it, there is NO touchscreen and so no swiping or tapping gestures like one is used to on a tablet can be used. The interaction is done with a remote control, which is a really different use case. So if you want to build an Android app that runs on smartphones, tables and also TV sets, you really need to reconsider the layout 3 times and pay your UX designers 3 times. A good codebase will use Android Fragments right from the start (in contrast to using Activities). That way, you will be able to rearrange UI elements (Fragments) on every platform for the users‘ needs.

We also attended an interesting talk about Vodafone’s implementation of the new RCS-e/joyn standard, which will enable smartphone users to use file sharing, video sharing, real time chat, Voice over IP and peer 2 peer networks „right from the start without registration across all operator networks“. This can be achived b/c the IMSI number from the smartphone is used as an ID whereas the complete service is run in the backend of the network operator. The new service of Vodafone will be opened to developers via an API called JIBE, is still in closed beta. Besides the best end-user marketing video on the droidcon the guys from Vodafone showcased a very interesting real time multiplayer game that uses joyn. Really responsive and fast! Once this is out of beta, it could be a really interesting new operator service to use for your own apps. We’ll definitely keep an eye on joyn!

Interesting to hear, that both Telecom Labs (Magitact) and Vodafone (RCS-e/joyn) plan to establish revenue share business models for their provided services. We will see, if and how this will work out in the end…

The droidcon 2012 closed with an Apple bashing talk of Sasha Pallenberg, a (tablet) hardware guru living in the androidified Taiwan, who stated that „Android tablets will outsell iPad by the end of 2012„. According to Pallenberg, Alibaba.com shows that there are more than 200.000 android tablets out there! These impressive numbers must come from the huge low-cost Android Tablet market in Asia.