Delphi XE5 App does not work with Android Lollipop

Last year I developed a prototype App using Delphi XE5 and deploying to my Nexus 4. It all worked OK and I was fairly happy with what I had. Last month I updated my Nexus phone to Android Lollipop, the other day I tried to open the App and nothing happened it just did not work anymore. I was a little disappointed and a similar App I had developed using Xamarin still worked fine. I am now not sure how feasible it is using Delphi to develop Android Apps.

Delphi vs Xamarin

Recently I have been doing some mobile development and assessing the pros and cons of Delphi and Xamarin. Here is a brief list of them, there will be more as I use both.

Delphi Pros

• Use existing familiar IDE.
• Quick to prototype and deploy to Android device.
• Easy to use interface designer.
• Large shared code base between different platforms.

Delphi Cons

• Expensive to purchase the latest version of Delphi.
• Crashes often with the loss of any recent changes.
• Slow to build and deploy.
• File size is big, 'Hello world' app will be at least 25MB.

Xamarin Pros

• Nice to use interface (C# code).
• Easy and quick to deploy app to Android.
• File size small, suspect this is due to it having to also deploy virtual platform.
• The app is quick to run on the device compared with Delphi app.
• Cheap compared with Delphi.

Xamarin Cons

• Less shared code between platforms.
• Interface designer does not feel as flexible.
• Properties inspector needs improving and is not as user friendly as Delphi.
• Online tutorials and help are not concise and some seem out of date.

I should point out the version of Delphi I used was XE5, the current release is XE7 so they might have fix a few bugs. I did go to a XE7 launch event (which I will write another blog entry about) and from what I saw and the questions I asked it is not much different and they have not done anything to improve the build time. When it comes to the speed of the build for Android it is best to build to the device rather than use the Android simulator which for both is very slow.

I will continue to add to this blog entry with other pros and cons as I come across them.

Delphi XE Android App Emulator Problem

I have recently been using Delphi XE5 do produce an Android mobile app. All was looking good until I wanted to run the app, the Android SDK comes with an Android emulator, but when I tried running the App from Delphi with the emulator running I just got a blank screen. When I plugged an Android device in it ran fine, so I thought it must be an issue with the emulator. After a few days of using the device I thought I would look into how to fix the emulator issue. All you need to do to fix this problem is to turn on the 'Use host GPU' option when setting up the device in the emulator, after that it will run, however there is another annoying issue, it is very slow.

You can now develop software for both iOS and Android

I've just read on the Embarcadero blog that you can take an iOS app developed in Delphi and retarget it to work as an Android app. Delphi for Android is still in beta, but this is a significant step to developing software in a single language and deploying it multiple platforms, and importantly the software run natively. If this works as well as they give the impression, Delphi will have solved one of the biggest issues with software development, that is employing different developers to develop similar software for different platforms. Because of this Delphi must surely become more popular.