A colleague of mine, Jack Cox, wrote an article recently about managing complex mobile transactions.  The article is written with an iOS slant but I found it very interesting and wondered if the paradigm could be implemented in Android and whether it could be effective.  After sitting down and doing some brain storming, I realized the pattern lent itself very well to Android.

One of the really neat things that Google has done with all of its Android applications is that they all share a common authentication mechanism in Accounts and Sync. There is no need to enter your Google credentials for each Google based application on your device, which centralizes password changes to a single location. It also groups those common authentication applications together in the Accounts and Sync settings activity, as I'm sure everyone is familiar with:

So, I am sitting at work having just finished a big production deployment. There’s a couple of weeks of wait time, and we have a big mobile project on the horizon, but company policy is preventing access to https sites. We have been given a directive to start learning Android development.

Gartner predicts that 30% of all BI will be consumed on mobile devices by 2013.  With the amount of interest in mobile BI and those kinds of bold predictions you would think it would be easy to understand the options available.  It is not.  There are a lot of things to consider when deciding what mobile BI tool and operating system fits for your organization:

In my previous entry, I discussed the shortcomings of Android in relation to the Enterprise and how it's not ready.  Several commenters stated we could get around this issue by adding this functionality to the application; being self-aware of application updates.  My team had discussed adding this sort of functionality before my blog entry, so we decided to go ahead and pursue this.  Close to 2 weeks ago, my team began gathering requirements and implementing a solution that would provide this self-awareness of application updates into our Android application.  An installation problem still exists if your carrier blocks installing from external sources, but we'll ignore that for this exercise.   

Android's just not ready yet.  There I got it off my chest.  Just like pulling off a Band-Aid.  I'm not even talking about the myth of fragmentation (and for the most part, it is a myth) or the missing Wifi proxy settings issue.  It's what happens after you author that wonderful application your enterprise so desperately needs...how do you distribute it? 

A few months ago I attended a presentation at MicroStrategy which focused on their Mobile product.  The class highlighted how information can be presented on iPhones and iPads in very useful and flexible ways, but one section of the presentation really sparked my interest.  It showed the usage growth of the various technologies as they become current: 

If these figures are to be believed, and I suspect they’re pretty close, then the evolution is continuing and rapidly expanding towards less expensive, more portable and easy to use devices.  For our discussion, let’s assume that Mobile Internet computing consists of phones (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc.) and tablets (iPad almost exclusively at this time).

Lately, there has been a rush of activity around building native applications for the various mobile devices.  The latest explosion of activity started in 2008 with two events: Apple opened-up the iPhone to 3rd party development by releasing the iPhone SDK,  and Google released Android as open-source software.  In 2010, of course, Apple fanned the flames with the release of the iPad, and Microsoft Windows Phone 7 looks like it will be a strong platform for mobile device custom development.  But even before these events, there had been waves of popularity of mobile development coinciding with the rise of Blackberry and before that, Palm devices.  It even used to be the case that something didn't have to be a phone to be a mobile device.  But now that most mobile devices are network-capable and the bandwidth available to them has expanded dramatically, the question becomes, "Do we need discreet native mobile applications, or can a single web a

Google co-founder Sergey Brin was quoted (off the record) last fall as saying that “Android and Chrome will likely converge over time”.  (cnet)

Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) put it a little “differently” in an interview about the same time.  To paraphrase – Android is for phones and Chrome is for PC’s and netbooks and they don’t completely overlap. (phandroid)

So, let see here…