Re:We Are the App Store
by cageface on Tuesday February 22, 2011 @06:54AM
(#2249593)
My sympathies are 100% with Android but until the underlying audio & media APIs are much more mature I just can't implement the kinds of apps I'm interested in on Android. I'm keeping an eye on it though.
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Absolutely. In a way the most shocking aspect of all this is that Google hasn't jumped at the opportunity to bring established app developers over to their platform. If Google continues to wait around and not refine their tools I can see Microsoft moving in to establish themselves as the underdog and as a strong developers choice.
What kind of apps? As of Gingerbread, the NDK supports OpenSL ES, which seems like a perfectly decent API for games and other low-latency audio applications.
Realtime, low-latency audiovisual instruments. OpenSL may make this possible, although that's not clear yet:
http://music.columbia.edu/pipermail/portaudio/2010-December/...
Contrast this with iOS which provides the robust and featureful CoreAudio api. As far as I can tell there doesn't appear to be anything like the new Accelerate framework introduced in iOS 4 for Android either, so things like native FFT aren't available.