The missing part in the Android development story

The Android platform is great. The thin Java layer on top of the real operating system has plenty of features. The development environment can be integrated with Eclipse providing you with a powerful tool to develop, run, test and debug your applications.

My question now is: What happens if I want to create my custom hardware and put Android OS in it? I think you’ll need to be a great hacker or a Linux kernel developer. Until now everything is good developing applications but only for commercial phones.

In the case of Microsoft’s Windows CE platform, you have hundred of integrated chip providers ready to use with WinCE. You can select the processor architecture to work with (ARM, MISP, x86). The Platform Builder is a tool to create your custom OS. You can include or drop the parts you are not interested (audio, video, usb, network, etc) with a mouse click. You can even adapt some of the drivers included in the tools, when source code is present.

If you are a small company in a hurry to create a hardware prototype, which platform will you chose, the Linux based Android or the Microsoft’s Windows CE platform?

Activity on Google Buzz, 16 people liked this, 16 comments

Land Of Awes

Posted May 13, 2010 at 3:33 am | Permalink

Windows didn't spring up that way overnight. They had years and years to develop everything. Google will too, over time.

Alden Torres

Posted May 13, 2010 at 3:43 am | Permalink

Hi @Land Of Awes, I hope so, since the lack of such tool in the Linux embedded area is frustrating.

Elias Mårtenson

Posted May 13, 2010 at 4:36 am | Permalink

I'd argue that Android isn't that hard to adapt to various hardware platforms. After all, a single person ported it to the iphone, which obviously wasn't even meant to run other operating systems.

Hugh Gordon

Posted May 13, 2010 at 5:03 am | Permalink

Android makes more sense for that kind of company as it's a sexier brand, with an ever increasing number of young cheap developers, and lower licencing costs.

But to be fair - any company that can afford the huge costs required to create custom hardware, won`t care about paying licencing costs or hiring a bunch of developers to customize either OS.

Alden Torres

Posted May 13, 2010 at 12:31 pm | Permalink

Hi @Elias Mårtenson, that case is a real hack but not a business one. What exactly can you do with Android in an iPhone?

Elias Mårtenson

Posted May 13, 2010 at 12:36 pm | Permalink

Pretty much everything. The point is that it's not that hard to port Android
to a new hardware architecture if you're skilled.

Alden Torres

Posted May 13, 2010 at 12:39 pm | Permalink

Hi @Hugh Gordon, today creating a custom hardware is not so costly. Of course, big deployments have huge costs, and this is why small companies are fighting for a big contract or a great partnership. In this case, the production of the HW concept/prototype needs to be as quick as possible.

James Harnedy

Posted May 13, 2010 at 1:00 pm | Permalink

The way I see it the Android team were busy building the platform itself up to now. The additional tools both for developers (UI Builder) and hardware OEMs (Platform Builder) will come once the core functionality reaches stability (which sounds like Froyo/2.2).

Andrea Olivato

Posted May 13, 2010 at 1:15 pm | Permalink

I agree with Elias, porting Android to other devices doesn't seem so difficult.

Xda developers ported various android version (up to 2.1) to many Windows CE phones (TYTN II, Vogue & more). I believe that was relatively simple because other HTC devices run Android and might share some component with Windows ones, anyway as James said the build tools will arrive in the next few releases, they have to :)

Alden Torres

Posted May 13, 2010 at 2:30 pm | Permalink

@Elias Mårtenson, @Andrea Olivato I don't know why you conclude it's a relative simple task doing this hack, all I can say is that Xda developers are pretty good hacking HTC phones. The iPhone effort is like a waste of time, sorry.

Hi @James Harnedy, I hope you are right in your vision.

Ashton Lafferty

Posted May 13, 2010 at 2:31 pm | Permalink

I just started playing with Linux Live USB Creator. A feature it has that I am enjoying is a drop-down menu of various img and iso files that it will go out and retrieve for you from the fastest mirror it finds (the list was updated during the 4 days I've been playing with it). One of them is Android x86 from http://www.androidx86.org/
Currently I'm playing with Jolicloud. Just wish I had a netbook instead of this laptop.

Evan Charlton

Posted May 13, 2010 at 3:23 pm | Permalink

@Alden - There are complete and thorough guides here: http://pdk.android.com/ and here: http://source.android.com/

Stephen Oglesby

Posted May 13, 2010 at 10:53 pm | Permalink

A single guy at my old company was able to port Android on to our phone hardware. He's a smart guy, but wasn't a skilled linux dev at the time. He did learn a lot from the experience though. As for Platform Builder, my God what a horribly irritating tool. I've recently developed drivers in WM7 and Android and will take Android development any day of the week.

Benjamin Wong

Posted May 14, 2010 at 12:55 am | Permalink

@Ken Hon Tan

Alden Torres

Posted May 14, 2010 at 3:22 am | Permalink

Hi @Evan Charlton, thanks for the links. I had to install the sources for dig into the Java layer and it's nice to read some of the comments left by Android developers.

Hi @Stephen Oglesby, thanks for your comment. That is a great story and good to know that you have early access to the WM7 OS environment.

Jacob McClain

Posted May 14, 2010 at 3:46 pm | Permalink

It does take a lot of work. It would be cool in an "ubuntu" build came out. Meaning you can just install it on anything and it would work pretty much.

The missing part in the Android development story

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