Of course I am a bit biased, even though I am trying to be objective, independent and open minded. Over the last hour or so I have been busy setting up an Android development environment. If you are wondering why, it is not just out of curiosity, I am also preparing for a training I am taking next week. Over time it is going to be cool to find and understand differences between developing for Windows Phone and for other mobile platforms. I am planning to share my experiences in one way or another.
When I started developing Windows Phone applications, I just went to the App Hub, clicked on the link to download the free tools, and waited for Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone and Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone to download and install. The development / design environment comes with a great emulator and within 30 minutes I was up and running (yes, I was using a slow Internet connection).
Today the story was slightly different. In order to start developing my first Android application, I had to download and install a Java SDK for which I went to Oracle. The next step was to download and install the Eclipse IDE for Java EE. Everything so far installed without any problem, but there is more to install. The next thing to install is the Android SDK, which has a nice Windows Installer. But wait …. what is installed is the SDK Starter Package, with which you can download the SDK’s you need for your particular target. It looks like the SDK Starter Package is a specific download manager for multiple Android SDK’s. The challenge now is to find out which SDK I need. I decided to just install the latest version, being SDK Android Plaform 3.2, API 13, revision 1. Hopefully this is the right SDK to get started. Finally, the ADT plugin for Eclipse is needed. Installing the plugin is done from inside Eclipse. In order to get the plugin, you have to run through 8 different, but easy steps. Once Eclipse is restarted, it now should be possible to develop my first Android application. Now, instead of 30 minutes to install a development environment, it took me over 2 hours. However, remember, this is the very first time that I am going to work with Eclipse, a Java SDK and Android. I can imagine that experienced Android developers install the tools way faster than I did. However, so far my conclusion for the day:
Windows Phone vs. Android: 1 – 0.
