I just got my new Nexus One smart-phone, a nice bit of tech powered by the open source Android operating system. I chose the Nexus One because it’s a phone developed in close cooperation with Google and Google is the primary developer of Android. I’m hoping that means that I won’t have to wait to get upgrades on the Android OS like my wife does with her Motorola Cliq.
I’m going to try developing some apps for the Android. So I’ll be writing more once I’ve had a chance to try it out. The charging light just turned green, which means I can play!
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Well, I mostly love my Nexus One and Android, but with any open system, there are some issues. The most annoying of which is the infamous FC or Force Close, which happens when there is an unrecoverable error in an application or when the system runs out of resources. Your phone can be working fine, then you load a few new applications and all of a sudden you can’t do a thing because of the constant Force Close messages.
I’m not as frustrated as I might be with another phone. For one thing, I can hook up a debugger and see what’s going on, making it a bit easier to figure stuff out. 
Since Android runs on lots of different phones, it has to deal with a lot of different configurations. Android developers don’t have the luxury of knowing the exact hardware configuration their software is expected to run on.
Another contributing factor to some of the problems people have been having is the comparative ease with which you can develop Android apps. That might sound contradictory, but the ease with which you can develop and publish an application is deceptively easy. There seem to be a lot of first-time developers who are writing applications for the first time.
– more later –
