It’s official: I *want* an Android phone. I’ve spent quite some time eyeballing the most recently released ones, but haven’t made up my mind yet. One of my colleagues got an HTC Desire recently, so I will wait a bit and see how well it works for him. His biggest gripe so far – in line with most opinions I read online – seems to be the battery life: it needs to be charged every day. Also – he explained to me – you don’t really quit Android apps when you close them, they hang around in the background, ready to be reactivated. This strange behaviour got me intrigued, so I did some online research on this topic.
Eventually I found a very interesting and extremely detailed StackOverflow response regarding the Android application lifecycle and why it is different from desktop applications and more similar to web applications. Another thorough explanation of what is happening with applications in the background is presented in this video by an Android team member:
Another interesting thing caught my eye while browsing for Android related bits and pieces: apparently there is a lot of activity regarding OSGi on Android. Apache Felix and Equinox were both successfully patched to run on Android, and ProSyst released their free OSGi runtime for several major mobile platforms, including Android. Neil Bartlett, one of the developers experimenting with Equinox on Android talks about this activity in a video interview with Michael Coté:
