Developing Apps ON honeycomb devices

Question

So here's what I was thinking. Android apps need to be developed on a computer before being installed to a mobile android device. Which was the best solution up until now. Most android enabled devices where phones, and who would want to develop an application on their phone, to small, and wouldn't be convenient.

But since the release of these 10" tablets running android 3.x, wouldn't it be easier to have an app that lets you develop honeycomb specific applications directly on these device ? Is this something that is in development, and if not, why not ? I am fairly new to android, so there are surely some aspect that I am overlooking that make the matter slightly more complicated.

Answer 1

There are multiple solutions now. I have checked out this app:

AIDE - Java IDE for Android

... and was fairly impressed. I really think you need an external bluetooth keyboard and mouse to be more productive. If your device has HDMI out or an MHL capable USB output, you can hook it up to a monitor and turn it more into a "Desktop". See here:

Using a Mobile Device as a Desktop Computer

Part 2: Using an Android Device as a Desktop

There are some caveats to doing that. For example, my device mirrors the display contents with the internal display's resolution (upscaled). So it is beneficial if your device has the same resolution as your screen, or at least a high enough resolution. Also, a tablet might be more suited, since it runs apps in tablet layout mode, versus a phone layout with everything being too large on a bigger screen. Also noteworthy are the back, home and multitasking buttons. The Galaxy Nexus is currently the only phone implementing these buttons as soft-keys, so they appear on the screen and you can click them with your bluetooth mouse. With a tablet, I think those buttons are always soft-keys, but other phones probably require to reach for the phone and click those buttons. Some of them have keys assigned to them on the keyboard, maybe all of them. Esc is back for example.

Answer 2

1. Build compiler, aapt, aidl, and other dev tools for Android.
2. Get a standard Java VM running on Android.
3. Get Eclipse running on Android.

I suspect at this point you will find the experience of Eclipse on a current ARM CPU to be... not so fun. :)

And the general UX is probably not so appropriate right now. For example, imagine debugging your app in a self-hosted environment. Without having multiple applications shown on the screen at the same time, this would be pretty painful.

There are already some things allowing simple development on Android, using interpreted languages like Smalltalk, web-based development, etc. I think we are a bit off from a full traditional Android development environment being self-hosted, but certainly it is fairly safe to assume that at some point it will happen.

Answer 3

As far as I know there is nothing available for this or in development at this moment.

I could think that you can create a Android app like the 'App Inventor' from Google for Honeycomb. With the App Inventor you can build a app with simple building blocks.

But a full development environment like Eclipse with the Android SDK will probably never work on a Honeycomb tablet. Development environment work best on large screens (something that you don't have on a tablet, because it's a mobile device) and you need to type a lot of code (something that is not really nice on a touchscreen).

The idea is create and it's a good question, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.