June 5th, 2008
50 questions asked and answered on Android
At the very end of the Google I/O 2008 conference last week the Android development team hosted a great fireside chat on the new mobile platform. The session was free-form, completely driven by questions from the audience. Although Google was trying to keep mum on a number of issues, several interesting tidbits slipped out. You might be surprised at who was asking a few of the questions, too.
From left to right: Andy Rubin, Brian Swetland, Dan Bornstein, San Mehat, Mike Cleron, Grace Kloba, Dave Bort, Steve Horowitz.
Since it was the last talk of the day, it went on rather long, but there were no complaints from the attendees. Besides, I had arrived early and snagged a nice comfy bean bag chair up front. The following is one of my trademark transcript/paraphrases of the session, taken down as fast as I could type for your enjoyment. There were 50 questions in all.
Q. Should we jump in to Android? What’s the guarantee that’s what I will see on a phone? Will service providers turn off things?
We’re going to provide a compatibility test suite.
A. Keep in mind it hasn’t shipped yet, This is the most interesting time. Once it’s open source, it could be locked down… they could create a derivative work.
We’re going to provide a piece of technology that tests the APIs. No time frame yet. The script will exercise the system. It’s a compatibility test suite, to make sure nothing got disabled or broken by accident, and also ensure that apps will work across OEMs.
Q. What if my app uses location api, and service provider shuts that off, can they?
A. They can do that… it’s not a perfect world. Rather than having us dictate what carriers and OEMs support, we let developers develop killer apps that will require it.
We want to ensure all the application development that goes on for Android… we want to give OEMs an incentive to keep things open. It’s a positive, self fulfilling vision.
Q. If I’m a game developer and I’m building piece of content and I want to sell it, how do I do that and realize revenue.
We wouldn’t have done our job if we didn’t consider distribution.
A. Content distribution — we’ve thought of that. It’d be great if there were a place where people could go to safely download and pay for content.
Q. What about copy protection?
A. We wouldn’t have done our job if we didn’t consider distribution.
[Note, at the opening session Google showed a new version of the Android home screen, which featured an icon for "Market". Presumably this is the as-yet-unannounced Android application store. -Ed]
Q. (Question from Verizon). We use SMS interception for system signalling. Is there a mechanism for an app to respond and stop the signaling chain? Is there security around that so that one vendor can’t hijack a message and respond to it?
A. There’s a mechanism where an application can register to receive a message with a certain signature and prevent others from getting it.
We have a system of permissions apps are able to declare, enforce, and require to perform certain operations. Things like dial the phone, get to contacts, etc.. But these aren’t things that are baked in the core of the system. An arbitrary app could declare custom permissions.
As far as restricting another app, the model we’ve been going by… the phone is not controlled by the application vendor, it’s controlled by the user. Whether or not the permissions are granted is up to the user that owns the phone. If you created a protocol that intercepts an SMS and another party wrote an app that intercepts the same SMS and the user wants to use that, the user could be free to stick that in.
Q. Can the user set a priority?
A. Don’t know, post your question to the developer’s community board.
Q. (Question from Media Power Group). In a previous release, XMPP was turned into GTalk. Will a future version have XMPP?
A. Goal is to have XMPP support after 1.0. [Later they said both GTalk and XMPP were post 1.0 features. -Ed]
Q. Java is more than a language. Google implemented its own VM. Could we use the Sun JVM? Explain the reasoning behind having your own.
We needed something with an Apache license.
A. We can have a more efficient interpreter and less memory pressure (by having Dalvik). You have to consider the holistic system performance. We had no choice but to run multiple VMs and processes. Share read-only memory across processes was important. Dalvik does that.
Also we needed something with an Apache license. At the time, nothing was available.
Q. Does Android support the Bluetooth serial port profile?
A. Yes.
Q. Can an application be started on powerup?
A. Yes.
Continue reading “50 questions”…
Ed Burnette is a professional developer and author of several articles and books about computing including Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 2nd Edition. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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