When Google releases a new beta, I rummage through the API differences report, the high-level overviews, and even the release blog post, to see if there are things that warrant more attention from developers. I try to emphasize mainstream features that any developer might reasonably use, along with things that may not get quite as much attention, because they are buried in the JavaDocs. As often happens with the first beta, we had a bunch of stuff deleted, meaning it shipped in a developer preview then was removed. My assumption is that these represent things that did not quite “make the cut ..read more

When Google releases a new developer preview, I rummage through the API differences report (even when Google does not seem to link to them ?), the high-level overviews, and even the release blog post, to see if there are things that warrant more attention from developers. I try to emphasize mainstream features that any developer might reasonably use, along with things that may not get quite as much attention, because they are buried in the JavaDocs. This release is much larger than was the previous developer preview. It feels like Developer Preview 1 was “low-hanging fruit”, to give developers ..read more

Wow, it’s February again already? When Google releases a new developer preview, I rummage through the API differences report the high-level overviews, and even the release blog post, to see if there are things that warrant more attention from developers. I try to emphasize mainstream features that any developer might reasonably use, along with things that may not get quite as much attention, because they are buried in the JavaDocs. Last year, a common complaint was how small Android 14 felt. This year, Android 14 seems huge by comparison. Android 15 DP1 is so small, Google did not bother writi ..read more

A couple of weeks ago, news broke that governments might be spying on push messages delivered through Apple’s push notification system or Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging. (hat tip to Prof. Matthew Green for raising awareness) IMHO, governments are only part of the problem. Apple and Google can read your push messages. While both firms claim that messages are encrypted, that is only for “data in motion”, as they are sent over the Internet. Messages in their servers are unencrypted. Not only can they access the data, but they can hand it to whoever they want to, not just governments. While the ..read more

This is the seventh and final post in a series where I am revisiting CommonsWare, my long-time business and current “hobby with a logo”. I thought it might be useful to some to see how all that came about, the decisions I made, and so on. The series: Waiting for a Chasm-Crosser Settling on a Business Model Dynamic Books Android or iPhone? The Summer of Silence Movin’ On Up The Omega and the Alpha As noted in the previous post, I had a lot of success in the early years. Things might have peaked for me in 2014-15, when I had the opportunity to train hundreds of developers at a device manufactu ..read more

This is the fifth of several posts where I am revisiting CommonsWare, my long-time business and current “hobby with a logo”. I thought it might be useful to some to see how all that came about, the decisions I made, and so on. The series: Waiting for a Chasm-Crosser Settling on a Business Model Dynamic Books Android or iPhone? The Summer of Silence To recap: in early 2008, I realized that Android was the best option for me to dive deeply into smartphones, rather than iPhone. And I thought that a business model based around frequently-updated books on rapidly-moving technology might work. So ..read more

This is the fourth of several posts where I am revisiting CommonsWare, my long-time business and current “hobby with a logo”. I thought it might be useful to some to see how all that came about, the decisions I made, and so on. The series: Waiting for a Chasm-Crosser Settling on a Business Model Dynamic Books Android or iPhone? Rolling back to where the first post ended, in late 2007: Apple announced that they would have a real SDK for developing iPhone apps in early 2008 Google released the first developer preview of Android I started experimenting with Android. The SDK was a bit odd ..read more

This is the third of several posts where I am revisiting CommonsWare, my long-time business and current “hobby with a logo”. I thought it might be useful to some to see how all that came about, the decisions I made, and so on. The series: Waiting for a Chasm-Crosser Settling on a Business Model Dynamic Books Part of the challenge in explaining where CommonsWare came from is that so much has changed since the mid-2000’s. What was innovative at the time is fairly ordinary today. Nowadays, online documentation for operating systems, programming languages, libraries, and tools is not merely expe ..read more

This is the second of several posts where I am revisiting CommonsWare, my long-time business and current “hobby with a logo”. I thought it might be useful to some to see how all that came about, the decisions I made, and so on. The series: Waiting for a Chasm-Crosser Settling on a Business Model One of the things I learned in my early entrepreneurial ventures is that I have zero marketing sense. That’s a slight problem for many businesses. I “kept my ear to the ground”, trying to identify some approach to business that might work despite my shortcomings. In March 2008 — as I was deciding whe ..read more

This is the first of several posts where I am revisiting CommonsWare, my long-time business and current “hobby with a logo”. I thought it might be useful to some to see how all that came about, the decisions I made, and so on. Often times, when I explain my adventures as a self-styled independent developer advocate for Android, I’m told “you were really lucky to get in on Android so early!” And, that is true: I did benefit from some luck, and I will point one prominent instance of that a few posts from now. However, in entrepreneurship and many other facets of life, you make your own luck. By ..read more