Android OEMs' Developer Program Problem
[caption id="attachment_137915" align="aligncenter" width="993"] Developer IDE[/caption] New Google Android handsets are being introduced all the time, from a variety of manufacturers. Consumers may be wowed by slim designs or splashy camera specs, but there’s an underlying problem for many software platforms: the developer program. Today, Huawei announced its latest device, the Mate 9. In a first for Huawei, it will (eventually) launch in the U.S., signaling the company’s intent to become a more global brand. With the Mate 9 comes EMUI, Huawei’s proprietary smartphone interface. Sadly, it’s just not very good. (The best praise Engadget’s Chris Velazco could give it? “You might not hate it.”) But while Huawei improves on its own flavor of Android, it’s leaving developers behind. The ‘Huawei Developer’s Zone’ is a busy hub of catch-all services, which makes sense as the company involves itself with much more than smartphones (there are IoT services, video solutions and services for cloud computing to consider). The problem is that most developers would rather find a more widely used solution via GitHub, where even Huawei’s open source efforts go unused. Huawei has an ‘eSDK IDE’ for Eclipse or Visual Studio (both actual IDEs, by the way), but that further compounds its problems: Visual Studio can’t take full advantage of Android toolkits, and Google has dropped support for Eclipse in favor of its own Android Developer Studio. Xiaomi fares better within the open-source community, but its developer center is confusing for any developers who don't speak Chinese. Even in translation, the developer hub seems more attuned to consumers than developers looking for APIs and SDKs. Domestically, OnePlus has been kicking up a lot of dust as a smartphone manufacturer, but plays its cards close to the chest. It has a presence on GitHub, but limits its involvement to basic Android kernel repos and various other boilerplate codebases. The company has no developer hub to speak of.