MOTODEV Blog

1. The design of the Android platform, the fact that I don't have to learn whole language to program for Android motivates me to develop for Android.

2. At present, I feel there are both kind of barriers present. The Android SDK is pretty good but far from mature. Still expecting many things. In terms of business, regional restrictions for Android Market are biggest hurdle for me as I am from India and I cannot release paid apps via market.

3.  MOTODEV community is making very good progress in development of tools and resources for Android platform. I would love to see further progress.

When I first tried the Android Beta SDK, it's use of Java with multiple threading capability and it's open source nature got me really excited about writing the apps "I've always wanted to carry with me at all times".

Now, my home screen (and my wife's too) are filled with apps which I wrote and use daily.  For example:

1. I started with a native app to remotely control and view the status of my home alarm.  The alarm calls me and others I trust when there is an alarm saving me a monthly alarm company fee.  With cupcake, I added a desktop widget so I can see my alarm status without even launching the app.

2. I also wrote an IP Camera Viewer app which let's me view and control my cameras around the house.  For example, I can see my kid is already home so I don't need to pick him up without having to call anyone.  It's also helpful if my alarm calls me or to check if I forgot to close the garage door.  With the help of lots of users, I've added support for hundreds of models of cameras.

http://hit-mob.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=18

3. Android app to view status and 24 history of all my environmental sensors at home (sensors mounted on a custom pic with a built-in web server taking up 12KB total).

4. Before the market go hot, I had written my own customized jobs, news, and podcast fetcher/viewer/player/notifier which I still use daily.

5. I started taking more pictures with my phone than my camera so I wrote a background app that checks for new pictures/videos and automatically uploads them to my raid NAS a midnight.  It also automatically cleans up my pictures on the phone that older than 2 weeks.  No more manually downloading and uploading pictures to my NAS after every trip with the camera.  Yes, there are now ways to uploading to online services but I like my raid NAS better.

I have more apps than that now (i.e. printing infrastructure for Android) but that's how I started.  Android has been so good to work with that any small bumps along the way are really insignificant.  This week, I tested my cam app in matrix mode on the Archos skin (higher resolution) and can't watch to get a hold of a real home device running Android (i.e. recent announcement from Cloud Telecomputers).

I'm so hooked, I've had opportunities to switch companies recently but have held off to wait for interesting Android opportunities.  Simply judging by the increase in Android job posting (especially in this market) is a great sign.

Good luck moto,

rob