Android

I gave a talk at the Free Software Conference 2009: "Google Android from a Developer's Perspective".

After the presentation I held a workshop, where I showed in practice how nice the development environment of Android really is. I used PreziMote, our OpenOffice.org remote control application as an example, which is able to control presentations over Bluetooth.

The slides may be downloaded from here. (in Hungarian)

One of the weaker points of the Android platform is the Media API. When compared to the J2ME API, one important feature is missing: the ability to record to a stream and to playback from a stream.

Why is this important? There are a number of use cases.

For recording:

• post-processing audio / video data before writing out to the file system
• broadcasting audio / video without writing out the data first into the file system, which also limits the broadcast to the available free space on the device.

For playback:

• pre-processing the audio / video data before playing
• streaming using protocols that are not supported by the built-in media player

In this blog entry we will show a method to broadcast video (and audio) from an Android phone to a network server, without writing to the file system.

As a nice Christmas Present for developers and hackers, Google announced a developer program where completely unlocked phones can be picked up for a very reasonable price. The phones include an open bootloader, so the developers may upload custom firmware to the phones. And the best news is that the program is also available for Hungarian developers!

The details can be found here: http://code.google.com/android/dev-devices.html

Our first contribution to the Android platform got just merged and deployed to production. Yes, we actually contributed to the Gerrit code review tool.

Our patch makes it possible to browse all changes, not just the open ones. Why is this important?

Every project's history is a very important asset. It documents decisions, like "why was this change merged" or more importantly "why was this change rejected". It also provides an access to historical discussions.

This makes the development process easier to follow, and more open to contributors.

In the past few weeks (or even months, before anything was even open sourced) many opinions appeared on the internet, that the Android platform is

• not really open
• includes kill switch, which is evil
• has substantial limitations
• reserves functionality to built-in / closed applications
• it is just J2ME in a new dress

I can completely understand this frustration. However, contrary to these opinions, I don't think that there is anything wrong with Android in this regard. The problem is, like in most cases, communication.

Many people, who read the slogan open source platform were actually expecting an open source firmware for mobile phones. Of course, this is not what Google promised.

So the real question is: What is an open source platform?