Android 2.3 Gingerbread Shows App Developers Some Love

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 07 Dec 2010

The great news for regular people is that later this month the Nexus S will become available for purchase (on the 16th of December in the US at Best Buy stores, and after the 20th of December in the UK at Carphone Warehouse Stores). Developed by Google in collaboration with Samsung, the Nexus S is powered by Android 2.0 'Gingerbread', the latest and greatest version of the Android operating system. If you want to see what software application Nexus S will come bundled with, check out this article.

The great news for app developers is that Gingerbread has been tweaked to help them more easily come up with cool apps that will captivate the users. As Google explained, Gingerbread comes with “many new platform technologies and APIs to help developers create great apps.”

If we were to highlight the ways in which Gingerbread shows games developers some love, we would have to put the spotlight on the following:
- A new concurrent garbage collector has been added and Android’s overall event handling has been improved. This translates to better overall responsiveness.
- A broad set of native APIs are now exposed, which means developers have native access to many parts of the Android operating system.
- Several new sensor types, including a gyroscope, can be accessed by game developers.
- Android 2.3 provides native support for the VP8 and WebM video formats and for AAC and AMR-wideband encoding. Android 2.3 also comes with new audio effects such as reverb, equalization, headphone virtualization, and bass boost. This means Android 2.3 offers a great multimedia environment for games and other applications.
- New capabilities can be included by developers in their applications because Android 2.3 includes support for front-facing camera, SIP/VOIP, and Near Field Communications (NFC).

Developers can find additional information on Android 2.3 is available
here.
They can also check out this YouTube video that showcases the new developer features in Android 2.3.


Latest News


Sony's 'Attack of the Blockbusters Sale' Slashes Prices in Half for a Ton of PS4 Games

17 Aug 2017

How Samsung's New T5 Compares to the Old T3 Portable SSD (Infographic)

17 Aug 2017

See all