If you're an Android developer and looking for ideas, start here | Hacker News Reader

If you're an Android developer and looking for ideas, start here

androidforums.com

68 pointsicey21 comments

Why do all of the Android websites look like crap on an Android phone? If there were a website you would think would have a good mobile layout, it would be one ostensibly dedicated to a mobile platform.

I can't say that I disagree with you. If you notice, these sites use ready to go platforms or forums without much attention to mobile users. Shame.

Henry Ford is reputed to have said, "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

Looking at this forum is fine, but you still have to go through the effort to integrate all of these disparate and narrow desires into something larger that you can build a business on. That's hard! Staying motivated while working on a problem that you don't have yourself is even harder.

I think the idea is to look for inspiration, not specifications. (At least, that's how I hope people would go about it)

Or in more concrete terms, customer problems that need solving.

Perhaps bioengineering would have advanced much further by now if he built a faster horse

I don't really think crowdsourcing app ideas is the best idea. Mostly you'll end up hearing from a loud minority. For example, there is a request for an Illinois Compiled Statute app....I don't really think that would have huge market appeal.

Developers are better off looking at small problems or annoyances in their day-to-day that they can solve using the Android (or any phone in fact).

A single developer looking at their day-to-day needs is going to consider maybe at most 5% of the total market need for Android apps. All developers together doing the same might consider only 40% of that possible market. ... and that piece of the market will be crowded.

A better approach is to consider how ubiquitous tablet/mobile almost-always-networked touch/voice-based computing is going to allow better HCI in what general spaces, cross-reference with a comprehensive list of industrial practices, see how those can improve, and team up with domain experts to identify common needs and start building libraries, back ends, and apps.

There are already too many to-do lists, casual games, and social apps. It's time to make industry more efficient.

and maybe look here for UI inspiration: http://wellplacedpixels.com/

Awesome. On page 2 is a request for the app I'm already building! I think I just found a few beta testers :)

Thanks for this! Now my only problem is being able to sell my apps. I'm from a country where we can't create Google Checkout merchant accounts so I can't sell apps in the Android Market. I hope this changes soon.

If you wrote an app that funneled ambient sound via the microphone to your headphones (handy for in-canal earphones as they block out so much external sound you can't hear people talking to you) would Android's flexibility allow this to be triggered in some simple manner? By simple manner I mean e.g. binding to a physical key or gesture, or adding to the built in audio app.

If you're looking for an idea to monetize, go into the iPhone app store, sort by most popular, rinse and repeat.

EDIT: Or NewGrounds or Download.com / games

If you're an Android developer and looking for work, please e-mail me. aarong /at/ thinkcomputer.com

An email client with copy and paste would be great, and zoom.

For Android phones with a physical keyboard, the Gmail app allows you to select/copy text by holding the shift key and dragging over the text on the screen.

Also, you can long-press on a text field, which brings up a select/copy/paste menu. This seems to work across all Android apps, and presumably works on non-keyboard phones.

>presumably works on non-keyboard phones

Yes , it does work on my Google Ion.

Great, but how does that allow me to copy text from someone else's email? Like a call in pin or something? If I click reply the quoted text does not show up in the text field.

Oh man, that's really bad. I rarely use the GMail app, so I hadn't run across this particular limitation yet.

I found a forum thread where someone found a sequence of interactions that work around the problem, but select/copy/paste really should be in the app's menu, like they are for the browser:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Mobile/thread...

Summary: You can use Shift-S to activate select mode, then use the scroll ball to select. (On a keyboardless phone, hold "menu" until the soft keyboard comes up, then press Shift-S to activate select mode.)

Wow thanks. Yeah that needs to get improved. :O

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