Tid Bit TechieVarta

The much anticipated Google Androids is finally released. Much has been talked about its possible implication on the mobile industry. Google with its reach has capability to redefine mobile world. I wanted to understand if Google platform really offers choices and to what extent. Here is my wishlist of things I will like to see in the Android platform:

• Android platform only supports a Java API. I call Google to support C/C++ APIs. That will allow us to quickly compile and use thousands of existing Unix applications and turn an Android platform in to a real toy to play with. Also, based on current APIs, it looks like the only way for someone to develop applications on Android is to write from scratch for the Android platform. Porting of existing applications (e.g. a different PIM then what Google supports), is extremely difficult.
• Google should support more platform oriented C APIs. Ofcourse Android uses Linux, so presumably some of the posix API are always available. However, what about graphics APIs? This will allow us to experiment with interesting twists to the platform. For example, we can replace Google’s default window manager with Nano-X or QTopia. I know this immediately raises possibility of code fork. However, the beauty of open source is choices. If we wanted to have one single application for one task and live with that, closed source software will be as good.
• One of the API capability which would have been very useful is to disassociate the UI from core which implements the functionality such that an application can keep the same UI and implement core with completely different methodology. For example, one can have the same browser interface and use Opera or IE rather then WebKit for rendering engine. The phone call UI can be the same however, the underlying plugin implementing the actual phone conversation can be traditional GSM or SIP or Skype. It is probably true that the Android platform has such a capability built-in for sanity of development. However, it will be very useful if Android exported this plugin based API such that independent software developers can build applications using this API.

Having said that, I will like to note that at least emulator is a breeze to use. I will post more about Android as I experiment and android (Yes using it as verb :))