Android

Now that XDC 2019 has passed, what is your feeling about how soon an Android alpha/beta will be released? I know Xojo still needs to implement the rest of the Xojo framework in Android, but I have also heard they said “soon”. Do you think it will be like another 5 months or more like 1 year?

Someday… as Xojo tends to announce the release of a product about 20 minutes after it is released.
Anything else would be 100% speculation, and not worth the pixels to print it

The folks I have spoken to that attended XDC left them with the impression that it might land this year - although of course Xojo didnt say that outright
But it was just the impression they were left with after being there, seeing the sessions and talking to Xojo staff

If you have the need to develop an app immediately, do not hold your breath. Rather go for an alternative. Chances are the first version will not be quite up to par with other, more mature development tools.

We’ve to await the presentation at our European Xojo Conference in October.
That’s over five months after XDC, so I hope to see some progress.

soon ?

As an example, I read the word recently about something and discovers that (in that case), recently was 9 years ago.

Conclusion: soon can be either next week (who is also next month) to next decade, century ! Or watever date you can have in mind.

At last, and because this is a marketing word, it can be anything.

You’d better follow Michel advice (read above): do not hold your breath !

For this year, you can try a web app and next year do something native…

My own personal take is that if we see Android this year it will be towards the end of the year. R2 most likely the start of API 2.0 (late July?). R3 most likely Web 2.0 (late October?). R4 beta of Android (December/Jan?)?

If you follow space launches you’ll see an acronym NET (Not Earlier Than) which I think Xojo could potentially use. And I believe NET 2019R4 is the closest guess at the moment.

not Xojo.NET !!! lol

hey I thought it was funny :slight_smile:

Just wait it for 2020 and be amazed if you see it in 2019. That’s one way of being happy.

Also consider that new features have too many bugs to be used in production. So, maybe add another year to the release dato to be sure.

How about we wait and see, first, before claiming it’s too buggy for production?

Nothing is perfect out the gate. But we can’t predict the quality/status when it does come out. All we should do is hope for the best, plan for the worst, and be happy when it’s in the middle.

As for timing. Xojo (company) was very tight lipped at XDC about dates/timelines/etc… but we can only wait and see when it comes out.

Weird that they added iOS but not Android. In my opinion, Android is way more important than iOS (which has only < 1/3 of the market share than Android). 2019 and no Android is no good.

Not really, given that Xojo is Mac centric iOS was a much easier target. Then of course there’s only one supplier of iOS products so standards are set unlike Android where all sorts of screen sizes etc. impact on the end result. On the other hand Apple don’t appear to care too much about their ecosystem so long as they’re making a buck, so you end up having to chase their tail to keep your product working.

People have to make planning assumptions, better to assume it will not be up to scratch and plan accordingly, no point in promising clients something you cannot deliver.

With Xojo ? Good luck !

An interesting expectation for your clients. How do they cope with that?

I’m expecting a beta release at some stage with limited capability and hopefully there won’t be a whole bunch of helpful people to wrap declares which will encourage Xojo to stand up & be the vendor.

My expectation is that I will be able to treat a mobile app the same as a desktop app i.e. tick the target & build, but we’ll have to wait & see.

Not really in our case. We were already working on converting to the LLVM compiler to be able to build 64-bit which gave us a huge leg up on building binaries for ARM processors. We even got Linux ARM with relatively little cost.

Android ended up being a largely isolated multi-year project… and we didn’t get much else with it. But we still needed LLVM first.