Developing for Mobile

Hi there, I'm back today talking about developing for mobile, and what its advantages and disadvantages are.

First off, they're mostly disadvantages, to be honest. The biggest frustration is testing code. The easiest way that we've found is to run the application on your phone through a USB, since the emulator is horrible and slow. Once running on the phone, you can set up a console to give you error output and standard output on the computer. In this way, you can see what went wrong if anything, since the phone does not give verbose output. The problem here is that we need to test outside sometimes. Since our application is motion and GPS based, a lot of the time we need to go outside and run around with it to test if features we implemented even worked. Needless to say, this makes it difficult to bring the computer with you to debug.

Another issue is artificial data. With computers, it is much easier to set up a system to feed your program false data so that you may test your code. With mobile, we are often pulling from sources on the phone itself and does not make sense to fake the data from it. Overall there are many difficulties developing for mobile since you are developing on a different platform than what you are developing for.

One positive aspect is that your program is as mobile as your phone. This means if you want to test data on a mountain, you don't need the computer just your phone, which is highly portable.

I like developing for mobile, because I think it's an important skill to know and it's so popular right now. There are so many apps being developed, but there are a lot of low quality apps developers have a chance to stand out from the crowd.