How similar is Android/smartphone development to Android/other-platform development?

Question

The more I program on the Android for smartphones platform the more I like. The way they made task management and inter-task messaging clean and easy is a treat (e.g. - AsyncTask, broadcasters, receivers, etc.).

How similar is Android development on other platforms, for example tablets or later Android based TVs, to Android for smartphones?

How compatible is code developed to run on the Android (phone) emulator to Android code running on other hardware platforms. If I write a lot of cool code for an Android smart phone, how much of it will I have to tweak/reinvent to get it to run on other Android platforms?

That leads to a huge question concerining Android (phone) UI widget portability. Does code that uses those objects run unmodified on other Android platforms? If not, how much effort is it to make Android code cross-hardware platform portable?

If the code is fairly portable, I think programming for the Android O/S on a table or regular Android PC if they gain popularity would be an excellent experience. If any of you have done Android programming on smart phones and on other hardware platforms, I'd love to hear what your experiences have been.

-- roschler

Answer 1

> How compatible is code developed to run on the Android (phone) emulator to Android code running on other hardware platforms. If I write a lot of cool code for an Android smart phone, how much of it will I have to tweak/reinvent to get it to run on other Android platforms? <<

If the code is logical or related to background processing (database, GPS, Accessing webservices) most of it should work as is on other platforms such as Tablets or Set Top Boxes.

The biggest problem is UI. As most of these devices have very different screen resolutions, most of the time one ends up doing the UI part twice. (This will vary depending upon the kind of application, How "cool" and pixel perfect the UI is, etc.)

In case of tablets you have a lot of screen real estate to play with and it will be criminal just to blow up the phone UI to match the table screen size. One can put many more useful user interactions with bigger screen space.

Android set top boxes is totally different domain as applications targeted at these are meant to run at HD TV resolutions but to be accessed from a few feet of distance. This calls for a completely new UI interaction. Some very nice guidelines published by Google in this regard can be found here.