Techreative

I’ve been doing more Android development lately, and while I’m a big fan of the platform, I’m learning that it’s biggest shortfall is that it’s too developer centric.  It’s configurable. It’s flexible.  You can build a UI in code, HTML or XML, your choice!  And you can control it all from your IDE or from the command line.  All of this is very nifty for developers, but it completely sucks for designers.

Simply put, all of these options are controlled inside Eclipse or via command line execution.  Most designers (not all, but most) I know work on a Mac, don’t have Eclipse installed and have never opened Terminal.  They tend to stare when I tell them to fix a problem with chmod.  For these designers, working with Android can be a challenge.  

I would love to be able to tell a designer to just install Eclipse or to work in Terminal, but this isn’t going to ever happen because it requires technical training — something many companies aren’t setup to handle.  The more common problem is that designers just don’t have the luxury of extra time to sit down and learn a new platform.  This is especially common when design teams are working on a larger platform of which the Android app is just one small piece.  In this case, they’re more focused on brand guidelines and visual consistency and less on the nuances that make this app uniquely Android.

So how do we solve this?  I could list about 20 things, but let’s keep it short and start with two simple things that Google can do to make Android development more designer (and client) friendly.

1. Create a simple, standalone, one-click installer for the simulator.

Two weeks ago, I was working with a designer on an Android app, and suggested she install the simulator to help her understand how the app worked.  She couldn’t figure it out, and when I jumped in to help out, here’s what I went through to set it up:

• Downloading and unpacking the SDK
• Opening Terminal (she had never used Terminal before)
• Navigating via command line to the installed dir.
• Launching the Android SDK and AVD Manager via Terminal
• Downloading and installing the various packages
• Setting up an alias to an installed virtual device
• Launching the emulator in Terminal to test
• Create an AppleScript that tells the Terminal to open and execute the command to launch the emulator
• Save the AppleScript as an Application

This process took 30 minutes.  Fine for me, yes, but for most designers they give up after step 4.  If I hadn’t done this for my designer, she probably wouldn’t have bothered and instead would have just looked for a PSD template online.  If it’s this difficult to setup an Android simulator, then non-technical people aren’t going to do it, and supporting them is crucial to the creation of great app ideas.  You’ve got to be able to play with something immediately out of the box, and a one-click simulator will go a long way to helping people discover what Android is like and start thinking about apps.

2. Allow users to install apps on the simulator via drag-n-drop.

Being able to drag an apk onto the simulator for testing would make it easier for clients and other non-technical stakeholders to quickly and easily review a work in progress.  The less time they can spend getting the apk installed, then the more time they get to spend focusing on the app itself and making it better.

And that’s it Google.  Do these two things.  Please.  And if you don’t do it, then I challenge a third party (ahem… Adobe?) to build some of these and start building some Android affinity.