One year of waiting - 5 minutes of work

It is now a year ago that I first started coding on the Android platform. While this is the first mobile platform I'm developing on there has been few hurtles during the year, much thanks to the good documentation and other developers on the forums. I have followed the improvements of the SDK with much interest since the initial preview and was delighted when they finally released the source of the platform together with the G1. And now there is something unreal with watching that application on the phone that for so long only has been another window on the computer.

When the SDK first came out, and until the G1 was released, many developers with experience from other mobile platforms complained that you can't develop for a mobile platform without having the physical device to ensure everything works as expected. Today Google proved, for me at least, that everyone that has been skeptical where wrong. Until about an hour ago I have only seen my application in the emulator on the computer. I did expect to get a similar result on the phone but I could not have dreamed of it being this simple.

Here are the 4 steps to get the applicatiton on the phone:
1) Check Settings->Applications->Development->USB debugging
2) Connect the USB
3) Run your project in Eclipse
4) Select the phone from available devices

That's right, it wasn't more to it!

The application is working great on the phone and the only real differences I can identify so far is that I have a touchscreen and not a mouse to work with and that the DPI is much higher. One thing that didn't work straight away however was debugging against the device, but I'm to excited to care about that now.

For the last month I have been using a G1 skin on the emulator and like to give credits to Jeffrey Sharkey for the great skin he has produced, check it out at: http://www.jsharkey.org/blog/2008/10/10/leveraging-the-android-emulator/

One year of waiting is now over and I like to hear what the skeptics should complain about now.