Android Developer Lab Summary
Great Android Developer Lab in London, Good to talk to Richard Hyndman Nick Butcher and Sparky Rhode . Main tips from the day;
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Fragments are the future. If you’re writing new code use Fragments. If you don’t you’re doing it wrong.
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Avoid showAsAction=“always”, Ice Cream Sandwich ‘phones can have small screens and so could be limited on space for options.
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Most of the best apps come from teams with Developers and Designers on them.
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There is an internal joke about Ice Cream Sandwich inside Google where some people call it Honey-phone due to the closeness of APIs, etc. to Honeycomb.
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There are very few cases where you shouldn’t request hardware acceleration, and in those cases (which involve custom drawing code), you can disable the acceleration on a per-View basis so the rest of the application can still benefit from it.
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Android Market ranks apps over periods of time, the order of the lists in terms of the period of time they use to rank apps is (from shortest to longest); Just In, Trending, Top New Free & Paid, Top Free & Paid, Top Grossing.
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Do your marketing at launch time and initially aim for the Trending list. Build your marketing plans from there to get into the other lists.
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Development companies can get a Market Top Developer badge by via their clients apps (you’ll need multiple apps with hundreds of thousands of downloads before you should think about trying that)
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The Market Publisher site (the one developers see) is being worked on, and Market UI/UX requests and suggestions could be made at the ADL.
Hope this is useful folks :).