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Android – An Innovative Platform

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This is a guest blogpost by Dirk Vranckaert, Java Software Engineer at RealDolmen.

Since Google released its first version of Android in Oct 2008, the OS evolved quite bit. Countless new features, bug fixes and a couple of large versions (each one affectionately named as some kind of dessert) gave the platform the maturity it has today. Android is now one of the major mobile platforms available. Globally it has 56% market share (Gartner), and Samsung takes a whopping a 20% market share making it the number one vendor.

Although year after year Android seems to gain a lot of market share, for companies this isn’t a comfortable situation. Why? Which platform should you choose to develop on and which users do you potentially leave behind? At RealDolmen we help our customers to answer this question based on the requirements of the application they want, the advantages each platform offers and the type of device that’s most suitable.

Widgets

One of the great platform features of Android are widgets. Widgets have been there since version 1.5 and have seen numerous improvements with each update. In the latest Android versions widgets became resizable and more controls were added to be used within widgets to gain more power. With a widget placed on your home screen you can easily view and share data and start an app or even a specific action in the app. So while there always is an entire app behind a widget, the widget lets you easily interact with the app.

Security, a big concern for companies

Another innovative feature of the Android OS has just been released in version Android Jelly Bean 4.2 and is called multi-user support. That seems quite easy and not such a big deal (on computers we already have this a long time) but for companies this is important. It just means that the OS is more secure. Tablets for example are often used by multiple users. Having the possibility to let other users use their own workspace on the device provides better security for your sensitive company-data.

The issue of fragmentation

Fragmentation is often one of the downsides mentioned by both Android and non-Android enthusiasts. However that’s not entirely true. Fragmentation is indeed an issue for Android and that because there’s not just one device released for the OS but everybody can produce its own device and ship it with Android. And then they can decide if they do want to bring updates to the device or not. So indeed fragmentation remains a concern. But Android app developers can handle this with the provided compatibility libraries for Android 1.6 backwards compatibility.

Choice of device, a vital advantage in a corporate environment

For companies it’s also important to choose the best device for their needs. For some companies ruggedized devices are a necessity. With Android that’s all possible as anybody can deliver a device running Android. Each having its own hardware specs.

Mobile and HTML5 are hot topics these days, competition between iOS and Android has never been so big, hybrid app-frameworks are trying to get in and all major conferences (such as Devoxx) have sessions about at least one of the topics. Here at RealDolmen mobile is also hot and getting more important. We follow all relevant technologies to provide our customers with the best application possible according to their needs.

Just like every year, RealDolmen will be present at Devoxx. So if you will be visiting Devoxx this year, be sure to visit our booth and take your chance to win a state-of-the-art Android tablet at the end of each day!


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