Android™ Runtime Development

[karthikpalanivelu]

Hi,

I am just wondering why look and feel of Android apps alone is different than the rest of the development platforms for BB10 & Playbook. I read somewhere that, RIM wants all of their apps to be consistent across all the platforms and that's why AIR apps and Native Apps have same UI. For example, the way menu is shown. the colour and size of the title bar, etc. But Android Runtime Apps are still having Android 2.3.3 UI. Will RIM work on this in future? Or always Android runtime apps will have different UI than Native BB10/Playbook apps? And also do they plan to support latest Android OS? Because it is really hard to go back to 2.3.3 so that I can port my app to BB10/PlayBook.

Thanks,

Karthik

[mwhiteman · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Since the Android Runtime is based off Android Gingerbread 2.3.3, menus and controls will shown as they would on an Android device. Converting menus and UI elements to be styled like native BlackBerry 10 apps could introduce a significant amount of issues with ported Android applications as they were not originally designed or developed to be re-styled.

We are however always looking at ways to improve the end user experience within the Android Runtime. One such feature for BlackBerry 10 was our integration to the new Keyboard, including text prediction. We will continue to add integration features such as this in the future to reduce the UI differences between native and Android Runtime applications. And yes, we are currently evaluating support for a new Android OS in future releases.

Thank you for your feedback,

[karthikpalanivelu]

Hi Thanks for the response. And about the keyboard, I just wanna mention an issue I noticed. When a TextField's input type is set to number, the popped up keyboard should automatically be in numeric mode. It happens in AIR & Native but not in Android. I just wanna mention if you are not already aware of it.

Thanks,

Karthik

[mwhiteman]

Thank you for the feedback. Yes, this will be something we are looking to resolve in an upcoming release.

Cheers,

[mikemcc]

Any idea when this will be resolved? (ie having the numeric keypad automatically pop up when inputType = number)

[karthikpalanivelu]

At least in 10.1 I guess..

[mwhiteman]

Hello,

Can you confirm which keyboard you are seeing in Air and Native for TextField's input type set to numeric? It should be one of these: http://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/documentation/ui/text/input_modes.html

Thanks,

Matt

[karthikpalanivelu]

I haven't developed my own AIR/Native app. So, I cant say what exactly in the code. But I have seen the numeric keyboards popped up automatically in those applications. And I am sure that they are not ported from Android. And When I ported my android app, only the default keyboard pops up.

[mwhiteman]

The reason I asked is that for this situation Android shows the password keyboard layout which has both numbers and characters. There isn't a native numeric only keyboard layout, but there is one for numbers and punctuations and hex values used for PIN entries. 

[karthikpalanivelu]

Yes. I got that. But What I expect is that, when the "inputtype" is set to "numeric", BB10 should display its own keyboard layout with nearest match. I would prefer "Numbers and punctuation". But not necessarily. I just don't want the user to press one key to get the numbers on the keyboard even though the "EditField" is going to accept only the numbers.