Is anyone working on making the android sdk easier to use?

Hi all,

I had my first taste of metawear in a hackathon just over a month ago.
Basically, we had two teams write the same app, one in iOS and the other in android.

The iOS metawear sdk proved to have a lot more integration making the apis a lot more useful.
Doing metawear development in Android was really an uphill task with a lot of BT connection code...
It would be a shame to have to rewrite this kind of code for every new project.

So a quick question before I throw myself into any android sdk improvement tasks: are such improvements already planned or already done (it has taken me more than a month already to write this post... life gets in the way)
and i haven't had much time to read up... does the metawear project accept external contributions: there's normally a link pointing to how to do this. if someone would kindly point me the right way...
Is anyone else interested in such improvements? It could just be that I don't understand how the android sdk should work and I have taken the long hard route for my project.

By the way, it is a great little product. I wouldn't bother to come on here and check what I could do if it wasn't!


Comments

  • Also if you compare both IOS and Android Sample apps :D you can see the huge difference, Android is soo buggy and needs features just like IOS
  • What kind of enhancements are you looking for?
  • I also have same problem when I want to send data to my email I always get an error. And also I can't see the real time data graph like iOS version. There were big difference between iOS and android application. I can't use the board well with android version even I downloaded from play store
  • It causes unreasonable bluetooth connection break , acc shows only results (no visual but shows triggers like tap or shake which is better than ios) and it shows the results in The middle of texts which means orientation of text fields are not tested in some screen resolutions , there are also sum bugs in features like vibrator, it doesnt work in android but works in ios.Also email function is not working. All in all, android sample app needs to be tested and needs to be fixed its bugs .I was almost send the board back after i couldnt test features except leds.Then i tried ios app and it all works fine
  • edited November 2014
    Please provide us stack traces and steps to reproduce bugs so we can fix the Android API asap.
  • edited November 2014
    Hi everyone,

    We appreciate you sharing your experiences of both the iOS and Android sample app. It really does help us make our software better. I just wanted to let you guys know that we are aware that our sample apps do not have the same functionality and that it in some cases, have functionality that is mutually exclusive from each other. Part of the reason for this issue is because we implemented what our power users on each platform wanted to see (in terms of features). Since these users had different requirements, the apps were therefore also different.

    We realize that this can be frustrating for some of you, and we will work to unify the functionality as much as we can in the near future.

    Thanks for your support and please continue to give us feedback (with details if possible) about your experiences with these sample apps!

    Thanks,
    Yu
  • edited November 2014
    Oops. I was expecting some email to tell me that there were replies on this but I must have turned off that option when signing on.
    Anyway I am here now.

    My original email didn't cover the sample app but the android sdk.

    I think one of the big differences between the android sdk and the ios one is the iOS api "startScanForMetaWearsAllowDuplicates".

    I recognise that it would be a big thing to turn the pages of android connection code needed to precede this into such a simple one liner but if you can get it right, it would be awesome.

    As for the sample app, I have to concur that it was quite buggy but it was an 8hour coding project... I didn't spend my time debugging it and hence do not have a list of things which went wrong with it. Hence, I did not actually mention it in my original post.

    I do remember some crashes when changing the LEDs and some funny behaviour when there was more than one metawear around but that is the best level of detail I can give. Unfortunately, I no longer have the metawear with me at the moment and cannot try things out and supply logs.


  • We will definitely look into making the suggested improvement. In the mean time, please feel free to let us know of specific issues if you think of any.

    Thanks!
This discussion has been closed.