I’ve decided to give a try to Android — the new Google mobile phone OS released last week — and to really have a taste of how it works, I wrote a little application for it.

TwitterDroid is an app designed for Android that lets you read and publish to your Twitter, it’s a kind of port of Twitterific, the excellent app for MacOS X.

TwitterDroid is an early alpha stage software but it’s already functional — you can read the latest 20 tweets from your friends and publish a post to your own timeline.

The app still lacks configuration, robustness and notifications — but it only took me a few hours to make it work, starting from scratch with the Android SDK.

A Taste of the SDK

As far as I can tell, Android is a pleasant and well-thought SDK with everything you can expect to write modern apps. Actually I found lots of similarities in concepts with Apple’s Cocoa (e.g.: the ways Views works and how you can animate transitions).

Android’s Java is really compliant with J2SE and I could have imported some code without any problem. Having integrated a complete J2SE stack in Android (and not J2ME) is a big win — even if you have to learn yet another set of APIs, it’s not really a big deal because most of them are already a standard (e.g.: OpenGL ES and J2SE itself).

That said, the documentation of Android is a bit of a burden, it’s not complete and you have to dig into samples to really understand how it works and how to structure your code; get ready for trial and error sessions.

What’s interesting though is that I found in the Android JAR more packages than the ones documented — the SDK is about 300 packages. Google has already provided packages for accessing Google services (e.g.: GData, Google Maps with Street View) out of the box.

What’s Next?

TwitterDroid needs a little more polish before release, but since the first hardware running Android will be only out in Q4 2008, I guess I have some time left.

Running TwitterDroid in an emulator has absolutely no interest in the short term and might not the be killer app Google is looking for the Android Developer Challenge.

But it’s fun to write anyway.

Many thanks to Florent for the logo.