Occasionally I watch road bicycling and it happens that I started following Vuelta 2013. Of course I downloaded the official application for Android as well – to keep an eye on standings. The poor quality of the Android application bothered me a bit. Both the lack of data and poor UI. Most notably I really found it hard to see where my favorite bicyclists are standing.
This triggered a well known feeling in me – I have to create my own Android application instead. For quite some time I was eying Android development but so far I didn’t have a proper motivation.Armed with Xamarin and MvvmCross I dived in. I had almost no experience with Android OS development, very little of Xamarin and none of MvvmCross. The goal was to create a MVVM based application that could leverage the common code along different mobile platforms though the current state is Android only application. I could create a version for iOS and Windows Phone 8 as well, I guess, but I don’t have a Mac (required to build for iOS) nor I want to loose a ton of time to enable Windows Phone development environment for a free application (which is a shame because WP8 development doesn’t look bad at all). Perhaps sometime.
The application itself is available for free through Google Play. Go, get it, while it is still actual.
About Xamarin
What they have done is simply amazing. Porting Mono (.net) stack to mobile platforms that is. Including the latest crazy useful async/await.This gives a .net developer an option to provide common code base for Windows RT, desktop Windows, Windows Phone, Android and iOS and to unleash the .net on platforms MS didn’t want you to. The community is there. But it comes with some quirks. Here are some major ones I found while developing with Visual Studio 2012:
- debugger is often slow. Sometimes it takes quite a lot of tenths of seconds to be able to inspect variables at a breakpoint
- async/await debugger breakpoints stop at random lines of code and often “Step Over” or “Step Into” means “Continue running”
- Portable Class Library support is still a problem (most notably, VS Android projects can’t reference PCL assemblies while Xamarin IDE intellisense goes beserk on PCLs)
- no profilers available (performance, memory) for Android. These are insanely important for mobile devices. Vote here.
- price for Indie developers (small shops) might be high
I am not exactly sure whether some of these problems might be attributed to VS or Xamarin integration. Anyway, none of these is a showstopper and I am sure they’ll be addressed.
About MvvmCross
This framework is an excellent open source MVVM starting point for cross platform .net mobile development. @slodge. the author, has done and is still doing an insane job. Not just by creating the framework but he is all over the Internet answering questions and writing (well, mostly recording) documentation and samples. That said there are some problems with MvvmCross:
- huge framework, takes time to grasp
- I miss better fundamentals description (i.e how DataContext is transferred to children)
- sometimes slow (i.e. startup time, ListView bindings). NOTE: since there is no performance profiler available I couldn’t exactly determine why it acts slowly sometimes. Could be Xamarin, could be MvvmCross or Android or my code.
- some error messages could be better (i.e. suggesting you a solution instead of just reporting errors)
But hey, it is open source and I plan to contribute if time permits.
About Android
It is not hard to learn the basics but it has plenty of small issues and traps one has to be aware of. The fragmentation doesn’t help either nor does java stack but overall it isn’t that big of an issue.
Then there are Intel Android x86 images which are used if you want to run the emulator. (Forget about ARM ones due to the slowness). Intel Android x86 v17 image has a quirk that logs messages like nuts making log window pretty much useless. Then there is the v18 image that fixed overlogging issue but introduced a new one. It’d throw “can’t resolve host” when using HttpClient 99% of the time. This issue might be attributed to Xamarin though as its browser doesn’t exhibit same problems.
Google Play store publishing
Straightforward, no issues. Wait, there is a potential problem. If you want to publish an app on Google Play store you have to comply to US laws, most notably they warn you of using encryption. I wonder why (rhetorical).
So, these are my impressions, after a week of development. Note that I mostly listed problems I’ve encountered not described the (bright points of) products in details.
Feel free to feedback me.