Ever since finding myself the happy owner of a Droid (+1 for early Christmas presents), I’ve found myself increasingly interested in the app market for Android-powered devices.
As has been noted in many iPhone/Droid sudden-death-round comparisons, the latter languishes in quality and quantity of available applications. Perhaps in an effort to increase Droid’s competitiveness in the market, the powers that be have created a new section of resources for Android developers. Let the games (and other apps) begin!
In the new Resources tab of the online Android SDK documentation, devs can now access technical articles, some pretty detailed tutorials, a breakdown of platform versions, common tasks, troubleshooting tips, a community across groups/IRC/Twitter channels and a library of code for sample apps – just what a mobile/smartphone developer would need to get started.
The list of sample code now includes:
- API Demos
- Bluetooth Chat
- Contact Manager
- Home
- JetBoy
- Lunar Lander
- Multiple Resolutions
- Note Pad
- Searchable Dictionary
- Snake
- Soft Keyboard
- Wiktionary
- Wiktionary (Simplified)
The Android dev team has also taken their most popular developer blog posts and turned them into a series of technical articles ranging in scope from backward compatibility issues and future-proofing apps to layout tricks and text-to-speech uses.
Currently, around 10,000 applications exist in the Android Market as compared to the (roughly) eleventy bajillion apps in the Apple App Store. Hopefully, these resources will help this open-source mobile development platform take off, allowing Android’s available applications to become a selling point for Android-powered devices rather than a point ceded to Apple in the smartphone wars.
