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I would love to be working on mobile apps, but for the expense of buying an iPhone, an Android phone and a Windows phone, plus licenses for software to develop

I would love to be working on mobile apps, but for the expense of buying an iPhone, an Android phone and a Windows phone, plus licenses for software to develop for all three. Well, do you really need to develop on all three? Among the reasons I got into Android development was because the upfront cost was $0. I just needed any laptop or desktop made in the past ~5 years, which I think all of us have already. After several weeks -- when I decided I didn't hate it completely, and I got tired of using the emulator -- I got an old phone off of eBay, and I actually spent less on that than I did on a book from O'Reilly. It's very easy to start programming for Android.

drbawb 14y ago
> Made in the past ~5 years. I'm dubious unless they've made serious improvements to the emulator since I last used it. (I haven't updated my SDK in probably 3-6 months.) I ran it on a fairly beefy laptop (although ~1.5-2 years at the time) and it was not an environment I'd consider "fun" to program in. They have ways to image the emulator for faster load-times, but that's not that much of an improvement, and it only affects the emulator boot-up time, not the application speed. I should try it again on my new desktop, complete with SSD and gobs of RAM. But honestly I would not develop for Android [relying solely on the emulator] on a machine much older than a year or two. I guess your mileage varied, but my experience developing for Android [w/o physical hardware] on fairly recent hardware was not pleasant. Had it been a hobby, and not my career, I would've been entirely put off with the experience. I probably wouldn't have gotten a phone, and I would've moved on to developing for another platform. Possibly WebOS, I remember it caught my eye back when the Pre launched; and I think it had the whole $0-up-front aspect in its favor.
- danielweber 14y ago
  Oh, I did have issues with the emulator. When I was just starting, I thought my hello-world program was broken because nothing was happening, but that was just the emulator taking so long to start up. Once I learned to keep it running I could iterate much faster, although I still had to be careful. Still, I got a decent-enough Android phone off of eBay for less than $30. Now I only pull up the emulator as the last part of testing before sending the app off to Amazon.

drbawb 14y ago

> Made in the past ~5 years. I'm dubious unless they've made serious improvements to the emulator since I last used it. (I haven't updated my SDK in probably 3-6 months.) I ran it on a fairly beefy laptop (although ~1.5-2 years at the time) and it was not an environment I'd consider "fun" to program in. They have ways to image the emulator for faster load-times, but that's not that much of an improvement, and it only affects the emulator boot-up time, not the application speed. I should try it again on my new desktop, complete with SSD and gobs of RAM. But honestly I would not develop for Android [relying solely on the emulator] on a machine much older than a year or two. I guess your mileage varied, but my experience developing for Android [w/o physical hardware] on fairly recent hardware was not pleasant. Had it been a hobby, and not my career, I would've been entirely put off with the experience. I probably wouldn't have gotten a phone, and I would've moved on to developing for another platform. Possibly WebOS, I remember it caught my eye back when the Pre launched; and I think it had the whole $0-up-front aspect in its favor.

danielweber 14y ago
Oh, I did have issues with the emulator. When I was just starting, I thought my hello-world program was broken because nothing was happening, but that was just the emulator taking so long to start up. Once I learned to keep it running I could iterate much faster, although I still had to be careful. Still, I got a decent-enough Android phone off of eBay for less than $30. Now I only pull up the emulator as the last part of testing before sending the app off to Amazon.