Android disappointment!!!

2012-01-01T09:35:00.000-08:00

Oh come on Google, get your acts together. I'd like to develop a mobile app that needs to contain some diagrams. I'd also like to use html 5 for the interface, both for learning and hoping that I can make it work on Android and iOS. So, diagrams == SVG in my head: it makes perfect sense and I discover that WebKit can show embedded SVG. It sounds pretty exciting and it is, my iPad is showing my diagrams quite well. Then reality kicks in: Android does not support this features unless you are using ICS or Honeycomb. I also made some experiments on my Samsung Galaxy testing CSS transitions, only to be shocked by the fact that 3D transitions do not perform as intended. From the jQuery mobile documentation:

NOTE: The flip transition isn't rendered correctly on most versions of Android because it lacks 3D CSS transform capabilities. Unfortunately, instead of ignoring the flip, Android makes the page "cartwheel" away by rotating instead of flipping. We recommend using this transition sparingly until support improves.

That's quite discouraging: Google is THE webcompany, but they cannot put proper HTML support in their mobile browser! Apple, instead, built first class HTML support in iOS. For example on iOS you can "install" a web application (even with some performance limitation up to iOS 4, solved in iOS 5), in Android you cannot do the same.
ICS is a step forward: it looks like the browser finally uses HW graphic acceleration and has 3D transitions but tt will take some time before it reaches a good number of handsets and even then it will be interesting to see how real devices will score.

For a complete outlook of the situation, look at this table.

Tech Verba

Android disappointment!!!