The final thing, the left out information from the above article is that I just got my Droid. I just walked into my first app market. You have been doing this for awhile. It is all new to me. I don’t know what I want. I can’t decide what I need. I am not ready to spend additional money when I don’t know how things are working. I need a little time. Let me check out your app for a week. Also, don’t charge exorbitant prices. Look at the difference between PC market share and Mac. Mac always had better product but higher prices. I am going with the cheaper one. Apps that are under 5.00 I can freely buy if I choose. I don’t feel the need to justify this to my family. But even at 5.00 I can’t afford to buy a ton of apps. At 1.00 each, I can buy a bunch. Sort of like Red Box compared to BlockBuster.

Users typically get half a dozen updates per day and it is difficult and time consuming to figure what changed and whether new useful features are available. This involves running each updated application and exhaustively wading through menus, commands and options.

If you’re a developer on previous platforms (chances are you are) check your monolithic application mindset at the door.

Too many apps on Android are written the same way their desktop cousins are: As a single big, huge application all running under one master “Process” that controls everything.

Under Android, however, applications should be broken up into different activities that operate independently. If you aren’t doing this, you’re writing bad applications.

For instance, the update process should be an activity of its own spawned by an alarm on the OS. Thus, when the update loads, it does its update, and goes away avoiding the persistent background process by using the alarm. Use the OS alarm function to schedule this activity, not having the activity running all the time!

And the benefit of doing so allows you to improve the performance of the app. When the user loads the app, the front-end that loads up should be a user interface activity – nothing else! Too many apps start “loading items” or “checking for updates” when I tap on them, and leave me sitting in frustration for minutes at a time staring at a spinning busy indicator. Why is the update checker/content downloader a part of the user interface?? If you are using Android OS properly, it is NOT a part of the user interface.

Proper app design would mean you use an OS alarm to schedule such processes, and thus the data is ready when the user clicks on the UI. Then the UI would be its own activity, not even TOUCHING the code for separate program functions until the user selects those items. Settings? Its own activity. Subscribe? Own activity. Gallery? You got it – its OWN ACTIVITY.

If you don’t understand this, you should NOT be writing for android, as monolithic programming is going to end in a bloated application that causes nothing but user frustration. Please read up on the concepts of Android programming before inflicting your memory/cpu suckers on us.