When creating android applications, that are not trivial, it is important to keep in mind that android activities, widgets, and services have somewhat autonomous lifecycles that are controlled by the operating system itself. This is profound impacts on how you have to think about applications, since there will no longer something unified, but rather are a lot of different parts that are being orchestrated somewhat randomly. For example, applications process can be terminated anytime, or its activities can be terminated, or its services can be restarted. If you do not plan for such diversity in lifecycle states when building each widget service or activity, you will have a really tough time syncing them all up in the final application.

Some Android phone manufacturers replace the default themes, and styles, and drawable assets with what they think looks good and customized. Unfortunately, the side effect of this customization is that what works great in the emulator, and most phones simply does not work these devices. Eg, Motorola Droid 2 and X have a customized theme that uses really dark backgrounds, and red foreground colors. This can wreck many applications that are designed for a light background with dark text color.

I’ve been working with various object encoding schemes to get information transferred over the network between services and mobile apps running on Android and BlackBerry. On Android, I figured I would try using Java object serialization, and that works some of the time, and not for anything complex. I wish the object serialization and deserialization mechanism in GWT would be ported over to all these mobile environments, but I digress. This tutorial outlines the use of JSON for this purpose.

I’ve written 3 tutorials to show you how to create a service enabled Android application that performs all of it’s network I/O in a background thread (not the UI thread). These tutorials are split into three parts. This tutorial shows you how to use background threads to perform long running network IO operations, so that the main UI thread is not locked up.

I’ve written 3 tutorials to show you how to create a service enabled Android application that performs all of it’s network I/O in a background thread (not the UI thread). These tutorials are split into three parts. This one shows you how to use Apache HTTP Client to connect to services over HTTP or HTTPS and exchange serialized Java objects with services.

I’ve written 3 tutorials to show you how to create a service enabled Android application that performs all of it’s network I/O in a background thread (not the UI thread). This tutorial shows you how to build a simple UI without using XML, by writing Java code to layout the UI.