Getting back to the Android Alternate Market Review series, this time I am covering Handster. This Android app market is independent from major carriers, and is multi-platform. Is it right for you though?
Update: Handster is no more, it’s now handled by Opera.
Also check out some of my other recent Android app market reviews:
This review is rather short, and you’ll see why in just a bit. I’m going to jump right into the features: Continue reading
We all know that it’s important to test the different configurations of your app, but it’s really difficult to get *every* configuration. The power of Android is its diversity. However, I just added a powerful new tool to my arsenal when I got a Xoom WiFi (update: oh man, this this is ancient now and I don’t test with it any more in 2020).
I expected a similar experience to my Droid, just with the new bells and whistles of Honeycomb (Android 3.x), and of course the larger screen. That wasn’t what I got.
I was immediately most impressed by the speedy interface and some new UI elements (dubbed the ‘holographic interface’). Games are more fun to play on a larger screen (when they don’t crash because they haven’t been tested on a tablet – more on that later). Reading books and documents is nicer. All-in-all, it’s a very nice toy – and a useful business tool.
However, the first thing I did after connecting up to my WiFi network was to download my first app, Droid Secret Tips. Oops – immediate force close.
Luckily, I had already fixed the most recent bug that the Android Developer Console had shown me. Continue reading
Just a quick note Android tablet users, since I spent a few hours dealing with frustrations with my new Xoom tablet. While much of the device and the Honeycomb (Android 3.1) OS work well for me, I ran into a few problems on day 2.
For me, these issues needed to be resolved before I could call this Android tablet usable. Hopefully this post will save you some time if you have similar problems.
One of the first things I thought of is putting videos on my Xoom. Since I opted for the WiFi-only model, I’ll need to pre-load it with content before I take it out of range – say on the airplane. I haven’t done extensive tests yet, but I found that the .m4v videos I already encoded to h.264 for my Droid do NOT work. Nor can other videos I have lying around. This isn’t convenient.
No, thanks for asking. That wasn’t the result I was hoping for. Continue reading
Just a quick note in case anyone else has had problems with the new Admob 4.1.0 SDK for their Android app. I just updated from 4.0.4, and was having problems.
Adview missing required XML attribute "adSize"
I found this link showing that some changes need to be made from your previously working AdMob setup in your Android app. The changes aren’t shown in the documentation yet.
Changes:
In addition, by adding this
ads:loadAdOnCreate="true"
You can remove this from your code (which I just added to accommodate the previous Google Admob SDK update). This restores the “just load an ad at startup” functionality that the Admob SDK previously had.
AdView adView = (AdView)this.findViewById(R.id.admob_adview);
if(null != adView) {
adView.loadAd(new AdRequest());
}
And just like that, I’m using the new AdMob SDK and am getting ads again in my app. I’m glad this release simplified things a little bit.
As a side note, it might be good to hold onto the previous version of third party libraries until you know the new one works. You often can’t get the old one after the new one goes online, and you might just be too tired to figure it out right now. Luckily that wasn’t one of those situations this time.
Here’s a preview for those of you reading this blog. I’ve been developing a reference chart showing what assets are needed when deploying your Android app to various app markets. For example, the Amazon Appstore expects different icon image sizes than the Android Market. Actually, every app market expects a different size.
While this isn’t a huge amount of work when you have one app and two app markets, what happens when your Android app collection includes a dozen apps on a dozen app markets? It can get to be a bit or work to keep it all straight.
The time it takes to deploy new apps as well as app updates starts to grow if you’re not careful. When you update screenshots, did you get all of the right sizes? Is your new promo video the right size for the different places you want to show it?
To keep it all straight, I created the Asset Matrix and started jamming as much info as I could into it so I can keep all of the markets straight. Now I can just look up what I need and create all of the icon images at once. I can also verify that I have everything I need before deploying.
I’m not done with the entire chart, but I have finished it for my favorite Android markets that I have put my paid app into.