Datasheet

Why Develop for Android?
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This openness and power ensure that anyone with the inclination can bring a vision to life at minimal
cost.
What Does It Have That Others Don’t?
Many of the features listed previously, such as 3D graphics and native database support, are also
available in other mobile SDKs. Here are some of the unique features that set Android apart:
➤ Google Map applications Google Maps for Mobile has been hugely popular, and Android
offers a Google Map as an atomic, reusable control for use in your applications. The Map
View lets you display, manipulate, and annotate a Google Map within your Activities to build
map-based applications using the familiar Google Maps interface.
➤ Background services and applications Background services let you create an application
that uses an event-driven model, working silently while other applications are being used or
while your mobile sits ignored until it rings, flashes, or vibrates to get your attention. Maybe
it’s a streaming music player, an application that tracks the stock market, alerting you to sig-
nificant changes in your portfolio, or a service that changes your ringtone or volume depend-
ing on your current location, the time of day, and the identity of the caller.
➤ Shared data and interprocess communication Using Intents and Content Providers,
Android lets your applications exchange messages, perform processing, and share data. You
can also use these mechanisms to leverage the data and functionality provided by the native
Android applications. To mitigate the risks of such an open strategy, each application’s
process, data storage, and files are private unless explicitly shared with other applications via
a full permission-based security mechanism detailed in Chapter 15.
➤ All applications are created equal Android doesn’t differentiate between native applications
and those developed by third parties. This gives consumers unprecedented power to change
the look and feel of their devices by letting them completely replace every native application
with a third-party alternative that has access to the same underlying data and hardware.
➤ Home-screen Widgets, Live Folders, Live Wallpaper, and the quick search box Using Wid-
gets, Live Folders, and Live Wallpaper, you can create windows into your application from
the phone’s home screen. The quick search box lets you integrate search results from your
application directly into the phone’s search functionality.
Changing the Mobile Development Landscape
Existing mobile development platforms have created an aura of exclusivity around mobile development.
Whether by design or as a side effect of the cost, complexity, or necessity for approval involved in
developing native applications, many mobile phones remain almost exactly as they were when first
purchased.
In contrast, Android allows, even encourages, radical change. As consumer devices, Android handsets
ship with a core set of the standard applications that consumers demand on a new phone, but the real
power lies in users’ ability to completely change how their devices look, feel, and function.
Android gives developers a great opportunity. All Android applications are a native part of the phone,
not just software that’s run in a sandbox on top of it. Rather than writing small-screen versions of