We recently had the chance to put a few questions to NitroDesk Inc., the development team responsible for the superb and hugely popular TouchDown, an Microsoft Exchange client for Android.  Here’s what they had to say:-

Can you tell us a little bit about NitroDesk and your development background?

NitroDesk was founded by Goutham in the summer of 2008, with nothing as investment but a $2000 laptop, developing Windows applications with a focus on integrating web based services such as online photo sites. When the TMobile G1 was released, NitroDesk was the first to offer a solution for corporate email on the platform. For the past year and half, we have been working solely on exchange integration for Android, and we have come a long way. Goutham has been a software engineer for about 20 years, and has built applications on a variety of platforms, right from assembly language on the x86 platforms, and has helped build high performance and high security solutions for healthcare networking.  Ron has extensive experience with mobile applications and information security from his previous jobs and is our platform-loving in-house geek.

What was the inspiration behind TouchDown? Was it borne out of frustration at the poor support for Exchange integration on early Android devices?

Yes, when the G1 was released, media had jumped all over it for not having an exchange integration solution. We jumped in at that time primarily because we saw an opportunity to bring our integration and development background to build a solution that would make a big difference to people’s lives.

TouchDown is a very popular and highly regarded app, you must be very satisfied with how it’s been received? Has it been more or less successful than you’d initially predicted?

It has been more successful than what we had ever imagined. When TouchDown was first released, we did not even have an Android device to test it with. Since this was a completely self funded venture, we resolved to never buy a device unless the application could prove its fate by paying for itself. Two years and over a hundred thousand users later, we are somewhat confident that it has some significant teeth. It has ups and downs, we screw up once in a while, but we have been blessed with a few thousand users who have stood by us and provided us with valuable feedback on the application and the scores of betas we released.

What were the biggest stumbling blocks you had in developing TouchDown, and, how long overall did the development cycle take?

There have been some stumbling blocks along the way, some of them causing us tremendous grief over the past months. We had issues with Android performing uncommanded deletes on our databases, issues with manufacturers throwing out new devices with newer versions of the Android much before we ever get to validate the application on them (Froyo is probably going to kill us one of these days). The biggest frustration for us is not the 325 character limitation on android market descriptions. It is the way our customers swamp us with support requests even before we are able to get the devices. This happened for the Droid, the incredible and is right now about to happen again with Froyo. All part of the game we are in. The development cycle has taken us over a year to get us where we are, with a steady stream of updates and improvements. And we aren’t done yet.

How have you found the experience of publishing apps to the official Android Market? Do you feel that there are some features that are missing or could be improved upon to make the Market better for publishers?

Everyone knows what’s wrong with the market. The biggest problem for us lies in the way the market simply loses purchased applications when a user moves from one device to another, or sometimes when upgrading the device. There is no way for a user to transfer licenses, and we get a fair amount of support calls by users who don’t even know what gmail id was used to purchase the application. This happens a lot when customers walk into a store and the retail employee creates bogus gmail accounts for the customers to make application purchases when the customer is waiting. We simply get overwhelmed with such requests these days and it gets worse every day. Another issue is the fact that the market maintains one version of the application only, with no way for customers to roll back or forward, and no way for us to publish an app for new users only, and to suppress updating existing customers or stage such updates.

Which Android devices do the folks at NitroDesk use?

Between us we have 2 G1s, a Cliq, a Nexus, an Incredible, a Galaxy, a Droid, a Sprint Hero. Those are the devices we are allowed to talk about J.

Which are your favourite Android apps?

PureWidgets by Francois, SMS popup, Google Maps and of course TouchDown, which helps us monitor our support alias while shopping for milk.

Are there any Android developers or development teams out there whose output has particularly impressed you, and why?

Our favorite is Francois DESLANDES (http://koxx3.wordpress.com/), who has produced an impressive array of widgets that everyone likes. We also like the guys at K9, and think they do a great job.

And, finally, what’s next for NitroDesk, further updates to TouchDown or something entirely different?

We still have a long way to go before we can say that TouchDown is done. There are still features that we want to add, things like more specific support for Notes and conversations and Free-Busy lookup with Exchange 2010, integration with Office Communicator, and so on. We like to stay building applications for the enterprise, or with an “integration” twist to it. Since our livelihoods depend on what we build, and since at any given time we have over a hundred outstanding requested features in TouchDown, we tend to never get any time for “fun” and free applications.

TouchDown is available on the Android Market now as a free 5 day trial and the full license key costs $19.99.

Myriad Group are one of the founding members of the Open Handset Alliance, and had a key role to play in the creation of the first Android handset, the G1, as well as in the HTC Hero. Myriad Group are unquestionably one of the leading contributors to the Android platform so far, are you surprised at how quickly Android has grown?

There are now 24 different Android devices available from 61 operators in 49 countries, and last month Eric Schmidt stated that Android is selling 60,000 handsets everyday. It’s important to keep in mind that Android holds slightly less than 10% global market share, so there’s still a way to go before achieving global domination. That said, it’s not surprising that Android has been quickly embraced as there has been clear demand by the industry and consumers for an alternative to what has existed in the market. Free and open source is an attractive element and Android will continue to benefit from introducing this model to mobile.

Dalvik Turbo was demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to much praise from the experts. How did the idea for optimizing the virtual machine come about, was it borne of frustration at limitations in the original Dalvik or was it simply that it was the next obvious step in the Android platform’s evolution?

We see Dalvik Turbo as a natural next step for OEMs, operators and developers. They’ve demanded, and we’re now able to supply through Dalvik Turbo, an increase in application execution speed and the opportunity for OEMs and operators to bring smoother delivery and more complex applications to Android phones. With Myriad’s deep heritage in dynamic adaptive compilation technology, we were able to create Dalvik Turbo as a drop-in alternative for the original VM, offering a seamless replacement that integrates directly into Android. Additionally, we’re now able to equip developers with the tools to take full advantage of Android by enabling them to implement advanced graphics and complex models into their games while retaining full compatibility with existing software.

How soon is it likely to be before we see devices running Dalvik Turbo? Will it be made available to users of existing Android devices, or will it be restricted to the next generation of phones?

Dalvik Turbo will be available for the next generation of phones and Myriad is expecting shipments beginning as early as this summer.

What’s the expected overall performance gain with Dalvik Turbo? What about for math intensive computations? Performance is hugely important to developers, especially game developers, what advantages does Dalvik Turbo offer to them?

Dalvik Turbo provides the maximum performance gain in applications where most of the code is written in Java. In the case of math intensive computations, this is exactly the type of use cases where Dalvik Turbo excels as the most “frequent” execution path will be compiled. Gains in such applications can be up to five times faster.

Perhaps most importantly, Dalvik Turbo enables developers to develop in Java without having to go native because of the original Dalvik’s performance limitations. This is a major advantage for developers and specifically for game developers who can reuse code and benefit from the productivity advantages that a managed language such as Java delivers.

You recently announced the launch of J2Android, allowing conversion of Java MIDlets to Android apps. A lot of Android developers already code in Java and then compile the bytecode to run in Dalvik themselves. What are the main advantages to using J2Android to convert the Java code?

As J2Android’s target market is really comprised of phone manufacturers, operators and mobile application stores at this point, we’re providing them the ability to more rapidly populate their Android storefronts with premium applications from launch, without the need for porting or middleware. They can either choose to spend time and money hiring a team of coders, sourcing necessary hardware and middleware and tracking down the original source code for each application – or they can simplify the entire process by utilizing a trouble-free and cost-effective solution like J2Android.Android developers can move their Java code across to

Android and rewrite their software to connect to the Android APIs. However, J2Android does not require any source code modifications and works at binary level with a very quick conversion process (seconds). This allows large collections of MIDlets to be available on Android without any need to go back to source code level.

Who do you see as being the main users of J2Android; mobile network carriers or individual developers?

At this point in time, we are focusing our efforts on offering J2Android to phone manufacturers, operators and mobile application stores.

Are you able to give us an insight in to what we can expect from Myriad Group for Android next?

We are proud of what has been achieved with Dalvik Turbo and at the same time are working on advancements in the compiler and the virtual machine arenas. We continue to work on innovative solutions for Android and across our whole portfolio, so stay tuned.

Thanks to the folks at Myriad Group for taking the time to answer our questions.

Following on from the news that People of Lava are going to be releasing a TV with Android 1.5 built-in, we thought we’d put a few questions to them.  People of Lava’s Marketing Director, Martin Ljunggren kindly took a few moments out from his day to answer our questions.  Here’s what he had to say:-

At the moment, the Android platform is not integrated in the TVs functionality. This may be something we will pursue in the future.

The 42″ units will start around €2,000-€2,500 at their launch at IFA in September.

What storage and memory sizes do the televisions use?  Is the storage expandable (eg: via MicroSD or USB)?

Extra storage, and all kinds of accessories can be added, using the integrated USB-port

Way back at the tail end of last year, I reviewed a beta version of a great security app called WaveSecure.  At that time, despite a few niggly flaws, it was obvious that this was a special app.  Those niggly flaws have all been resolved and WaveSecure went on to become one of the overall winners of ADC2.

WaveSecure is a security app which allows you to remotely lock and/or wipe your mobile phone should it get lost or stolen.  You can also use it to backup and restore your messages, contacts, etc or even use a phone’s location services to track down where your lost or stolen phone has ended up.  It’s an essential app to have for anyone who carries confidential or important data around with them on their phone.

WaveSecure’s developers, Singapore based tenCube, have published versions of the app for multiple mobile phone OS’es such as Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Blackberry.  And, from their About page,  they “are recognized as one of the Top 100 tech start-ups in Asia by Red Herring, as well as Global Top 16 start-up by Intel-Berkeley Entrepreneurship challenge. WaveSecure was awarded ‘Top 10 wireless innovations’ by Frost & Sullivan and is one of six recipients of GES Award by Asian Wall Street Journal.”

The folks at tenCube very kindly agreed to answer a few questions on their experiences with getting WaveSecure for Android published, and also discussed their future plans for the app.

Firstly, can you tell us a little bit about tenCube and it’s background in mobile applications development?

tenCube was started about 5 years back. We are a bunch of startup geeks looking for something cutting edge to do, and we particularly like mobile so we have focused our energy on thinking about the future of mobile back then. It was pretty clear that, software on standard open mobile OSes (now often simplified to just “apps”, which often implies simple programs and may understate the potential of mobile software).

We started looking at various applications that could be interesting and then one day, almost by accident, we discovered our purpose, as you can see in the answer to the next question.

What was the inspiration for WaveSecure?  Did someone at the company lose a mobile, or have it stolen?

Exactly, it’s a classic story. One of the founders, Varun Chatterji, lost his brand new phone, the Nokia 6600, which was a very expensive and advanced phone back then. So it dawned on us that actually the biggest problem we face in mobile industry is the simple fact that people lose phones – anything between 5-25% of a population, depending on where you are, loses a phone a year. It was already a pretty huge problem back then, with almost a billion phones. And this is only going be more massive, within 5 years the problem has tripled to 3 billion mobile users, most of them are doing more and more important things on the phone – email, texting/IM, photos, browsing, social networking, banking, etc.

More importantly, the fundamental idea is that – you should NOT need to lose a phone ever again. Mobiles are always-on, always-connected, it is smart and collects lots of data and has the ability to send them wirelessly. You can lose your wallet or keys and not get them back, these are dumb offline objects, but there is absolutely no reason why you should lose your phone!

And we are all about changing that.

WaveSecure is available on a number of different mobile OSes, which is the most popular format?

By user base, the biggest is still Symbian S60. However, by rate of growth, Android is definitely sky rocketing.

Can you let us know a little bit about the development cycle for your apps – do you code everything from scratch for each phone OS, or do you code in one coding environment and port the titles across?

We wish we could code in one environment and port across platforms but unfortunately it is not as simple as it sounds. It is especially complicated for WaveSecure because we access a lot of low level system APIs and all the clients for different platforms interface with the WaveSecure server.

Some platforms such as Android and BlackBerry could share some code since they are both based on Java. However, the code shared was only about 40% and the rest had to be written from scratch.

From a development cycle perspective, the four main platforms that we support (Android, Symbian, WM, BB) are run by different teams on independent cycles. The approach we usually take for new features is to have one platform implement it first, and once the specs are fleshed out and the kinks + flows are ironed out, the rest of the platforms follow suit.

Many users, myself included, first became aware of the name WaveSecure when it was announced that the app would be bundled as part of the MoDaCo custom rom for the Hero.  How did that come about, did you approach Paul, or did he make contact with you?

Paul sent us a 2 line email after about 2 weeks of listing our app on Android Market and asked if he could distribute our app with the MoDaCo custom ROM. We weren’t sure what to expect but we were very glad to work with Modaco because we believe, in the long run, that a product like WaveSecure should come as part of the OS/firmware, it should be available by default and should be resilient against any attacks such as firmware reset, etc. Modaco is a very good step towards setting a standard for that, and Modaco users are also very savvy users who understands the benefits of a ROM-integrated WaveSecure instantly.

It was a pleasant surprise. As you said, a lot of people got to hear about us because of this and we got great feedback from the MoDaCo community (not to mention a fantastic extended, highly capable test users who gave us great feedback). This helped us improve our app tremendously. It so happened that this was the critical period of September – November 2009 where a slew of new Android devices (and OS versions) were launched and we got a lot of help from the MoDaCo community to support new devices, networks etc

Paul’s decision to include us in the MoDaCo ROM definitely contributed to our ADC win and we are thankful for it. We continue to work closely with the MoDaCo community and plan to continue to offer WaveSecure for free to MoDaCo premium members once WaveSecure becomes a paid app on 1^st April, 2010.

How have you found publishing apps to the Android Market?  Do you think there is anything that could be done to improve the market?  And, how does it stack up against the other OS apps markets?

Compared to other app stores, submission and approval process for apps on Android Market is relatively fuss-free. However, the tool available to publishers to measure app performance is rather limited. Aside from a total download count, Market doesn’t offer you any other metric relating to performance. You can’t even separate downloads by month or country. Offering Google Analytics tracking for Market seems like a logical move. They are already offering similar integration with AdSense and AdWords.

More can be done to help publishers, too. Starting with simple yet essential things like increasing the current 325-characters limit of the app description. The web listing of Android Market at http://www.android.com/market/ actually hinders people from exploring various apps. In fact, you can’t even perform a search, kind of an irony coming from Google. This obvious void prompted as many sites such as Androlib offer users a better and richer alternative.

If Google is offering Checkout as the only payment method, country coverage needs to be expanded so developers can better monetize their apps. Else, other modes of payment could be offered.

Do you publish your apps to any of the non-official Android markets?  If so, how have you found that experience?

Yes, we have published to the non-official Android Markets. The publishing experience was pretty seamless, but the experience from the user perspective to discover the non-top 50 apps could be better. That said, this is a problem with the Android Market as well

Which devices do you use for testing, and which (if any) Android devices do you use yourself for the day to day stuff?

We carry around a lot of Android devices and they double up as our testing devices. Given the fragmentation of the platform, we have to test on a wide range of Android devices in house to ensure that we’ve covered as many Android devices as possible. The list of devices that we test on for every release includes:

1. HTC Dream (stock, Android 1.6)
2. HTC Dream (rooted, Android 1.5)
3. HTC Hero (rooted, MoDaCo)
4. HTC Hero (stock, 1.5)
5. Nexus One (stock, 2.1)
6. HTC Tattoo (stock, 1.6)
7. Geeks’Phone One (rooted, 1.5)
8. Sony Ericsson X10 (stock, 1.6)

If there is a big, new feature that we introduce that requires testing on devices/networks that we don’t have access to here in Singapore (such as the Droid and the Sprint Hero) we tap on our champion users who are very helpful in helping us test out new features!

Personally, our top favorites are – Dream, Hero & X10

What are your favourite free and paid Android apps?

1. Millionaire (Japanese card game, not longer available on the Android Market)
2. Pinball by Androlib
3. Remote Desktop Pro
4. Log Collector
5. Advanced Task Killer
6. Shazam
7. Wireless Tether for root users

(we won’t be so shameless to list WaveSecure, but would love to know if your readers would consider it part of the list!)

How have you found developing for Android? Are there any tools or functions that you’d like to see included that aren’t currently?

Android’s SDK has a good set of developer tools. It’s always a good sign if a platform lets you focus more on your business logic and application workflows than the intricacies of implementation. It is fairly simple to do a lot of tasks on Android which can consume quite a bit of time on other platforms. One of the biggest plus points that Android has over other mobile development platforms is that it dramatically reduces the time it takes to test out small modifications to your code.

Being open source is of great help as well, we referred to the Android source code numerous times to see how things are implemented and learned by example.

Most of our grievance has been around the restrictions that have been put around 3rd party applications. Enabling GPS programmatically, ability to trap the home key, etc can add a lot more value to WaveSecure.

What’s next for your team?  Further updates to WaveSecure, or are you planning on something entirely new?

We believe WaveSecure has a lot more potential to be the ultimate security killer app, and we have a long way more to go to make that happen. Not only in terms of making the product better by enhancing its functionalities and features, but a lot of work also go under the hood to scalability, speed, reliability, SMS infrastructure, performance, etc. We have been working on this for almost 5 years now and will not stop until we have actually solve this problem once and for all.

Can you give us a little teaser as to what any new WaveSecure features will be?

Oh there are plenty of new things we are adding to WaveSecure in the near future, as a heads-up for this month, we have kinda invented a technique to overcome the fact that you can easily uninstall Android apps. This is quite exciting as we think this would add a lot of value to users, so watch out for the update coming soon! 

The official description reads:-

“Finally it’s possible to install Android apps from a web interface!

Browse the app market on www.appbrain.com from a desktop computer and use this app to install and uninstall the apps you selected on that website!

Appbrain.com has: Related apps, fast search, popularity lists, wishlists, and sharing of app lists!”

We contacted AppBrain’s creators, Swiss CodeMonkeys, to see if they’d be interested in giving us some of their thoughts on Android development and the Android Market.  Here’s what they had to say:-

Firstly, can you tell us a little bit about your team and it’s development
background?
We (Uwe Maurer and Mathijs Vogelzang) were both working as software engineers at Google Zurich. We got G1 phones as Christmas present in 2008. We then started developing the Swiss Codemonkey apps in January 2009 as a hobby project to have some fun with our new phones. In summer 2009 we decided to do this full-time since it was so much fun and our apps were so successful.

Your company has released quite a number of apps to the Android Market,
ranging from free novelty apps to premium apps such as Photo Effects.  Which
has proven to be your most popular?

We first built a website to browse and select apps, and sync it with the phone. We also added related apps, fast and relevant search, new browse pages like for price reduced apps.  Since we launched this first version we added personalized recommendations, and the possibility to share apps with others and browse their favorite apps.

So far the reactions of the users have been extremely positive, and we are working on making the service better everyday. So keep watching http://www.appbrain.com

However there are a lot of things that could make it easier to find, share and install good apps. That’s why we made AppBrain and we will continue to add features to improve app discovery. Unfortunately we are a bit limited by how we have to integrate with the Android Market app. It would be great if Google would offer an API to the Android Market, to allow for instance installing all apps a user selected on AppBrain with a single click.

Following on from Gamevil’s recent announcement that an Android version of Zenonia will be released later this month, we thought we’d take the opportunity to find out a little bit more about the company and their plans for their Android titles.  Gamevil have a few Android games on the market already, including the very popular Baseball Superstars.  Kyu Lee, President of Gamevil USA, kindly agreed to answer a few of our questions.

Firstly, can you tell us a little bit about Gamevil and it’s background in mobile games development?

“GAMEVIL is a public mobile game developer and publisher. It was established in the year 2000, and ever since we have been developing for handhelds. We currently have offices in Seoul and Los Angeles with around 110 employees in total.”

You recently announced the release of an Android version of Zenonia.  Do you have any plans for further ports of your games to Android?

“Yes, we are planning to continuously develop and port new games for the Android platform.”

You have a few titles in the Android market already, such as Path of a Warrior and Baseball Superstars, which has proven the most popular?

“Baseball Superstars has been the best performing title on the Android platform so far.”

What is Gamevil’s prefered development environment?  Do you code for one particular format (eg iPhone or Windows Mobile) and then port a title to the others or do you use a separate, generic development environment and port from there?

“We originally develop our games in native C/C++ language to support WIPI-C, and we then port to other platforms including Android.”

Can you tell us a little bit about the general development cycle for your titles?  How do you approach creating a new title and how is your team structured?

“We currently have about 110 employees and among them 80 our involved in game development. And we produce about 10 titles annually every year. So on average, you can assume it is a 8 person team working on a single title for a year.”

Which, if any, Android devices do your team use (either for testing or for their own personal use)?

“Our team primarily tests on the G1, Hero, DROID and the Nexus One.  Nexus One is the more popular device among members of our team. For our team in Korea, the new MOTOROI is the device that they have been supporting.”

Fragmentation of hardware and OS versions has been the biggest criticism of the Android OS so far.  Has fragmentation caused any issues during the development of your Android titles?

“We now support two different screensizes as default. And fragmentation also does involve more testing, and we expect the amount of testing to increase in the future if this continues to happen.”

Piracy is an issue which affects all professional games’ developers to some extent, how badly would you say Gamevil have been affected by piracy?  Do you use any copy protection methods for your mobile titles?

“We’ve been using the default copy protection methods that Google provides, but however, we haven’t been adding any internal solution to our Android titles yet. We respect our users, and believe they will not pirate our titles to create an healthy ecosystem to continuously develop better titles for the platform.”

A number of games publishers have already expressed dismay at poor sales of Android titles, have you found that sales of your Android games have been disappointing compared to your predictions?  And, going forward, how much potential do Gamevil see in Android as a platform?

“Baseball Superstars has been one of the better selling titles on the Android platform. It may be small but it is enough to justify our development cost and we believe it is an investment into the future for the Android community.”

Can you give us an insight in to any future titles we can expect to see Gamevil releasing to the Android Market?

“We’re currently considering bringing Baseball Superstars 2010 to the Android platform, and also planning on bringing more based on the amount of success we see here.”

Thanks again to Kyu Lee and Gamevil USA Inc for granting us the interview. Baseball Superstars and Path of a Warrior are available for purchase on the Android Market now and Zenonia should be available at some point later this month.

Mario of Badlogic Games has agreed to answer a few of our questions.  Badlogic Games are the people behind the physics puzzler Newton, which has recently broken 10,000 downloads on the Android Market.  No mean feat.  As well as developing in Android, Mario writes a blog detailing his experiences with developing Android games.  As part of the blog, Mario has let his readers in on his next Android project, which is pretty exciting – an Audiosurf inspired procedurally generated game which uses the player’s music to generate gameplay.

What’s your development background?

I’ve been developing apps, games and libraries for 16 years now. I started with QBasic and x86 Assembler back in 1994 at the age of 11. My parents bought me a 40Mhz 486 with an incredible 8Mb of RAM. Over the years i got my hands dirty with some other languages like Pascal, C/C++, Java, C#, Mips assembly, a bit of Python and some nasty Php. At university i did some functional programming which was a neat experience but i wouldn’t recommend it for production if you want to keep your mental sanity. I’ve worked at a company in Graz, Austria, named Know Center, since 2006 where my job is mostly about programming in Java. It’s a research facility so i do some scientific things in the area of natural language processing and supervised/unsupervised machine learning. My number one love was and still is game and graphics programming as it is what i grew up with. My initial motivation was to work out how those nice little Game Boy games come to life back in the early 90ies.

Newton is an ongoing project, with additional levels being worked on at time of writing, but how long did it take to get the initial version of Newton to the Android Market?

Getting the initial version done took about 2 weeks. Most of the time i spent on writting a game programming library that allows me to run all my games on the desktop as well as on Android. All graphics, input, sound and file i/o is wrapped and uses the respective backend libraries for each platform. The game itself took maybe 4-5 days. Publishing it to the market was a piece of cake really. That’s something Google got right in my opinion.

Which Android device(s) do you use yourself?

I have a Motorola Milestone (Droid in the US) and a HTC Hero which i gave to my girlfriend Stefanie  who’s also part of Badlogic Games.

Is there anything you wish you’d done differently with Newton?

A lot of things. The presentation is kinda boring and unimaginative. Maybe going with the usual doodle style would have given a few better ratings. The 3D version doesn’t look all that impressive either. I wanted to get the game out as fast as possible and couldn’t come up with a better style in time. Apart from that i think the rest of the game is pretty solid.

You’re working on a very exciting concept for your next app, a music-adapting game that uses mp3 music to generate gameplay.  Can you tell us a little bit about it and what your vision is for how the final game will actually play?

I stumbled across Audiosurf a couple of weeks ago and was pretty impressed with the idea of procedurally generated levels based on music the player can provide himself. As oposed to games like Guitar Hero where you only get a set of predefined tracks the publisher thinks will work with most of the audience the procedural approach allows for a much more customized experience. I think this is essential for music games as music is a matter of taste. I want the game to adapt to a player’s musical taste as much as possible and with the procedural approach this becomes a possibility. It also removes the need for me to create levels myself which i pretty much suck at. I’m not exactly sure where the game will head but it won’t have any puzzler elements like Audiosurf does. I will probably focus on a more arcade style racing game. Maybe i’ll go a completely different route though, away from the racing theme. It all depends on how well the audio analysis stage performs in the end. I think Audiosurf did a good job for specific genres but fails horribly for others. If i can get that part done well enough it opens more possibilities.

From reading your blog, I can see the music-adapting game project you are working on currently involves a lot of research in to sound recognition and beat detection, how much time are you investing in research and do you always use such a scientific approach to development projects?

Researching solutions for the problem at hand always takes up a lot of the total development time. Usually there’s not a lot to research for games like Newton as i pretty much know how to go about stuff from the beginning. The audio project is a bit different. I have some experience with processing audio but not enough to get the job done good enough for this project. Audio processing is a mathematical problem so you won’t find a lot of the usual tutorials out there like you get for say OpenGL and the likes. As I do scientific research in my day job I’m used to digging my way through scientifc literature and there’s a lot of good stuff there on the problem of onset/beat detection. So going that route was a no-brainer really after realising that there’s just not enough material out there that is non-scientific and covers all my needs.

Newton is a free app, and is growing rapidly in popularity.  Do you have any plans to release paid for apps in the future or will you be sticking to freebies?

The version of Newton on the market is a kind of test balloon to get a feeling for how the market behaves. It might not be ideal in that regard as Newton is not a game that appeals to everyone. Never the less i gained a lot of insight in publishing a free app with just enough content to get a user interested. I plan on releasing a full paid version for Newton as soon as Stefanie finishes of designing all the new levels needed to justify demanding money from people. Along with the new levels i already integrated a level editor and the possibility to share and download user generated levels in-game. The audio project will definetely be a paid app. However, i think it’s just fair to release demos for people to try out a game before they decide to buy. So there will of course be a lite version that will let you play a few of your songs to get a taste of the game. In any case i don’t expect to get rich but i’d love to get just enough money out of the paid versions to amortise the cost of my two Android devices

What are your favourite Android apps and games?  Is there an app you couldn’t live without?

The one app that i use most often is TaskPanel, a free task manager that allows me to kill processes. Also useful for me as a developer is SendLog which allows people to send me the logging output of my crashing apps. Apart from that i use the Mother TED app from time to time to view some TED talks. Astro is my file manager of choice which is pretty awesome. Apart from that i don’t have any other apps installed on my phone. On the gaming side i have lots of games that come and go. I mostly install and play games to check out other peoples work and compare the experience i have with the user ratings and comments for the game. It’s a bit of market research i guess. I haven’t yet played any game for entertainment or against boredom to be honest. I was impressed with the games by Polarbit but at the same time a bit disappointed that they just did straight ports of the IPhone games which are pretty old already. The games by Hexage have a nice quality to them which i just can’t describe in words. They just feel right. Robert Green’s Battery Powered Games are also pretty good. My girlfriend can’t stop playing Light Racer for some magic reason that eludes me.

How have you found developing in Android.  Is there anything you feel could be done to improve the Android development process, anything missing that would be useful?

Developing for Android proved to be extremely easy. The integration with Eclipse and the very good documentation let you get things done in no time if you already have a Java background. Doing some minor native coding can also be accomplished pretty quickly with the NDK. However, i wished that the NDK toolchain would use the standard *nix build process. It’s damn annoying to get some open source libraries that would just compile and work fine on ARM to work with the NDK toolchain. Apart from that i found a lot of bugs in the graphics drivers which is not Google’s fault be the phone manufacturers fault. OpenGL ES does some really weird things on many phones which makes testing for a small developer like myself really hard. Financially more potent teams have the advantage of being able to test their code on many more devices than i can, guaranteeing smooth deployment. A lot of my initial bad ratings had to do with bugs i just couldn’t reproduce due to me not possesing say a Samsung Galaxy. The emulator is no help there. It would also be nice to have access to the media file decoding facilities. That’s something i could have really used in my audio project and finding that it can’t be done without porting a couple of open source decoders for mp3 and oggs was kind of frustrating. The most frustrating thing was to discover that multi-touch on all Android devices that claim to support it actually doesn’t work. I shared this frustration with Robert from Battery Powered Games. Game developers can’t do multitouch games on Android like you find them on the IPhone. That eliminates a lot of genres, especially arcade titles which most often use a dual stick setup. Even worse, the reaction of the Google framework developers came pretty late and wasn’t giving any insights on how to fix the problems. The only urged us to not fill bug reports as this is a hardware problem. It’s really kind of sad. Other than that i love programming for Android. It’s an exceptionally well thought out environment.

How much potential do you feel the Android platform has?

I’m not much of an oracle i really can’t predict how Android will work out. Taking the viewpoint of a user i love Android and would wish it to be as successful as possible. The platform is really awesome and can compare easily with Blackberries or IPhones in its latest iteration. Seeing how a lot of major manufacturers will release Android phones this year i guess Android might well have a bright future. I’d love that to be the case but only time can tell. It will probably take up a lot of the market but the process will be very very slow.

Any advice for aspiring Android developers?

RTFM! Know your way around Java and Eclipse and don’t be afraid of using native code for better performance. Get onto the android mailing lists and ask intelligent questions there, help will be given to you. And don’t forget you are working on a mobile platform, you can’t do just anything there.

Thanks again to Mario for taking the time to answer our quetions.

Newton is available now for free on the Android Market.  The Badlogic Games blog can be found here and is well worth a read for anyone who is even remotely interested in Android development.

Polarbit are a developer of 3D games for multiple mobile formats.  They have an enviable back catalogue of titles containing some seriously big name games, such as SSX, Krash Bandicoot and Tiger Woods 07.  They’ve released a number of 3D titles to the Android Market, such as the excellent Raging Thunder.  I have a feeling they are going to be a very big player in the Android Market over the next few years.  The guys at Polarbit kindly indulged me a few moments of their time for an interview.  Here it is in full-

Firstly, can you tell us a little bit about your company and its background in games development?

“Polarbit have been going at it since early 2005. The founders all have a solid background in mobile game development, going back as far as there have actually been games done on mobile devices.

Some of us come from the emulator scene – arcade emulation specifically. The guys that did the Rage and NeoRage NeoGeo emulators are part of Polarbits founding team. Some of us come from the console and PC side and some of us have earned our stripes at Polarbit.

Our work can be divided into two interconnected sections – game and middleware development.

We have developed and maintain our own Middleware platform, called Fuse. Fuse enables us to reach all major mobile platforms with one single source code. In other words, the source code for our Android games is exactly the same code as that for iPhone, or Ovi, or PC and so on. Consequently – no need for porting of any code, besides Fuse itself.

We then rely on Fuse in our development, both proprietary titles and for external parties such as publishers.”

Polarbit have created mobile versions of a number of high profile games, such as Spore, Crash Bandicoot Nitro Racing 3D and Fifa 10.  Which, if any, do you guys consider your flagship game, the one you’d name first when asked to list your portfolio?

“This is almost like asking which of our children we prefer.
The first title we did was Raging Thunder. It made a name for us on Symbian, Palm and other platforms back when 3D titles for mobile phones was uncommon.

We also got Raging Thunder out as a free download for the iPhone, even before the AppStore was launched – so it put us on the map there as well. Today, we have RT, and all our other titles, out for Android and on the Ovi Store and getting a lot of positive attention for getting high-quality games out early on these platforms as well.

If we go by the third-party stuff we’ve done, Crash Bandicoot did a lot for us in showing that we are a solid developer for publishers to rely on. FIFA10 is also a major title, which we are very happy with.”

“It depends on which game you’re making, I guess. We’ve mostly done 3D games, and might not be the best people to comment the differences between 2D and 3D development.”

Are all of your Android titles ports of other versions or have any been developed for Android from scratch?  Which is your preferred development environment for creating titles?

“As I mentioned, we don’t really develop for any one specific platform. We develop our games for Fuse, and then we port Fuse to new platforms as they are made available.

We’re agnostics when it comes to tools. As long as they get the job done and aren’t too annoying to work with, they’re fine.”

Can you tell us a little bit about the general development cycle for your titles?  How do you approach creating a new title and how is your team structured?

“We’ll spend about half a year on average on a high-end title, from design to deployment. It varies a bit from title to title, but by and large about six months.

We typically work with smallish, focused teams. We strive to employ only highly skilled people – the ideal situation is that any one Polarbit employee can step up and take a lead artist or developer role after a couple of months in the company.

Depending on the size and specifics of a given project, they might include 1-4 coders, 1 or 2 artists and a coordinator. In some cases more.”

Which of your Android titles has proven the most popular?

“It’s interesting, because all the titles we have out so far seem to have a dedicated group of people playing them. Raging Thunder has seen the most downloads so far, but that’s more or less to be expected. Racing titles have a broad appeal on all platforms.

We’re seeing quite a lot of multiplayer activity for all titles on the server, which is something we’re really happy about. At this point, I think Polarbit are unique in offering cross-platform multiplayer – that is, Android users can seamlessly play against iPhone users and Nokia Ovi users.”

Which, if any, Android devices do your team use (either for testing or for their own personal use)?

“Since it is crucial for us that Fuse is tested and verified to support as many devices as possible, we have quite a few different handsets lying around the office. I think we have most devices that are currently available in Sweden, a few that aren’t and some pre-release stuff.

The Motorola Droid is very popular at Polarbit HQ, as is the SonyEricsson

X10 (you have something to look forward to there, in case you haven’t been able to try one out yet).

I personally use an HTC Tattoo. Nice form-factor and you get good battery life due to the QVGA screen.”

“It’s very early to tell at this point.

In general, application stores like Android Market, AppStore and Ovi Store are A Good Thing for developers, since it shortens the distance between us and the end-user. Fewer steps mean less people to share the pie, and more pie for us.

For Android Market specifically, we would like to see paid application made available on a wider range of markets. Before we have a broad deployment of the service, we can’t say much about the long-term profitability.”

The Android Market receives a lot of criticism from users and developers alike, how has Polarbit’s experience of publishing apps on the market been?

“We haven’t had any major difficulties in publishing our titles – in getting them out there.

The biggest issue we see with Android Market is, like I said, that paid applications are only available in a few markets. We’d also really like to see it made easier for developers to precisely specify which devices, or groups of devices, that support or do not support an application.

From the customer feedback we’ve received so far, it seems some people have had difficulties with transactions and payment options. Amex cards for instance won’t work when buying something from a European seller, which is a problem for some.”

Piracy is a major concern for developers of Android apps, have you been affected by piracy of any of your apps?  Do you feel that more could or should be done to combat piracy of Android apps?

“Yeah, of course we’re affected by piracy. That’s true for any platform we’ve worked with. Some people just don’t feel like paying for stuff.

It’s a tricky issue, though. Anti-piracy measures tend to create quite a bit of extra work on behalf of the developers. If there are certification authorities and stuff involved, you can bet that it’ll add extra costs as well. And ultimately, our work will still get cracked and traded.

The people that are determined to steal your stuff will find some way to do it, whichever measures you take to prevent them. What you need to protect yourself from – and this is especially true in low-cost markets such as mobile games – is the casual piracy, people trading your games because it’s easier to get it from a friend than from the official source. Or in the case of Android Market, because it isn’t conveniently available in your particular national market at all.”

Has the well publicised fragmentation of the Android OS affected you in any way?  If so, how have your team been working around this?

“The way we see it, device fragmentation is par for the course on mobile platforms. That’s why we’ve developed Fuse. Of course, some handset manufacturers are better than others when it comes to implementing and adhering to standards…”

You have a few more Android games in the pipeline, notably a sequel to 3D racer, Raging Thunder, can you divulge any other upcoming releases to whet our appetites?

“Not at this point, no. Sorry.”

For more news regarding Polarbit and their upcoming titles, check out their website.

Can you tell us a little bit about your development background and any other projects you have been involved in?

“Our background is primarily in web development.  Collectively, we have over 20 years experience and have developed all kinds of different projects across many industries, to include PC games.  Mobile gaming was something we had always been interested in, and a natural progression for us.”

The games in the spooky Mystique series are among the best loved games in the Android Market.  What was the inspiration for Mystique?

“We wanted to make something outstanding and rather thrilling to play. As our lead developer is a big fan of horror films (from “A Nightmare on Elm Street” to the popular horror movies of today), we decided to develop something in that genre.”

“Once the story was developed and storyboarded, Chapter 1: Foetus was developed in about a week.  Chapter 2: The Child, which was more complex and contained more content, took about a month to develop after story development. The main headache in both efforts was to create a professional looking game on a device with certain software and hardware limits (not to mention having to account for the many different Android phones and versions on the market). Also, Chapter 1: Foetus was done on the emulator event without having a real phone.”

“We currently have the HTC G1, HTC Tattoo, Motorola Droid,  and Motorola Cliq.”

Which is your favourite Android app (other than your own of course)?

“Taskiller, Astro, MapDroyd, Quick Settings.”

“We believe that one day it will be the leading platform. We have done some development for the iPhone, but ultimately have decided to focus primarily on the Android OS.”

“Hmmm, it’s difficult to say. We have found all the necessary features for our development thus far, and really have no complaints.”

“We started developing in Android for fun. Having a collective Java development background, we decided to give a try and see what would happen.  After developing some test games and then Mystique Ch1: Foetus, we were very happy with (and a bit surprised by) the power of the Android platform.  More importantly, we see great potential that Android will continue to grow in sophistication over time.”

“We have two main feedback points: (1) the Android market needs an easier purchasing process,  and (2) the market should be made available via computer (like iTunes). This may make the users’/developers’ experience less complicated.”

Piracy is a major concern for developers of Android apps, have you been affected by piracy of your apps?  Do you feel that more could or should be done to combat it?

“Yeah, we have found our games on file sharing websites and torrents.  We understand that piracy cannot be avoided, but it still disappoints us, as we are spending a lot of time and resources making games that people can enjoy.  It is the revenue gained from the market sales that enables us to continue forward with development of new games and chapters.”

Has the much-maligned fragmentation of the Android OS affected you in any way?  If so, how have you been working around this?

“Having lots of devices and OS versions makes the user experience richer, but at the same time introduces a couple of challenges for the developers:

1. we are not able to quickly integrate features that take advantage of new OS functionality without first considering an alternative for legacy OS devices, and
2. as new devices are introduced, we must ensure that our legacy games are compatible with new interfaces, displays, etc.”

You have a couple of other apps on the market, a Tangram app and an app called Straight Scoop, which generates random answers to user created questions.  What do you plan on working on next – further chapters of Mystique, updates to your other titles, or something entirely new?

“Right now we are working on the third chapter of Mystique: Obitus, which should be available on Android market in February. You can see the latest game trailer on our website at http://www.bendroid.com.  After this, we will focus on other 3D games that take advantage of our proprietary 3D engine.”

Any advice for aspiring Android devs?

“Be creative, focus on quality and pay attention to detail.  The mobile gaming community is very viral, and positive user ratings and comments really help an app or game get noticed.”

Bendroid games have a number of apps live on the Android market at the moment, with more to come, including, as mentioned in the interview, part 3 of the excellent and hugely popular Mystique series (see video teaser below).  Check out their website at http://www.bendroid.com/ for more news.

Beebplayer, a media app which ties in to BBC’s iPlayer service,  has been one of my favourite apps since I first started using Android.  So, I was delighted when it’s developer, David Johnston, agreed to answer a few questions for This Android Life. (Apologies to my non-UK based readers, this probably won’t mean much to you!).

Firstly, congratulations on a great app.  Beebplayer is widely regarded as one of the must-have Android apps for UK-based users.  Was there any one moment or incident that inspired you to develop the app?

Test, test, test and look at the Market’s best apps for inspiration and clues on how to do things ‘right’.