Yesterday I gave Google Earth a try to see what the Sky view looks like. Playing around, I decided to switch on all content layers around my area. ( 47°51'49.49"N, 11°22'41.96"E )
Happily I discovered that the virtual world around our place is not yet polluted with YouTube smog. Curious to see what a busy place looks like, I flew over to San Francisco and here is what I found:
Isn't this overvhelming already?
How will you be able to find a recommended Thai restaurant on a mobile screen?
Imagine every single person walking around using an Android phone, constantly sharing location, pictures, videos, going sightseeing and getting shopping hints from commercial offers. If this would work like Google Earth does today, the vertical extension of layered icons would make the phone screen shatter.
What struck me when I used Google Earth was how long it took to load all the data. I have a very fast broadband connection but still it took minutes to load all these icons.
When the usage of Android devices picks up, the amount of location-based data is going to double every other month. Obviously it is not going to work that all the data around you gets pushed onto your device every time you open a map.
In this scenario caching on devices will be essential.
Searches will not be fulltext only but possibly highly complex. For instance you may want to have a constant “my dream spouse” query running with all the criteria you like about a man/woman, to recognize a candidate when you run into him/her on the street.
Imagine 1 billion people in China or India running this query. Can this still be handled well by a monolithic server architecture?
Maybe full scalability could be the best scalability: Devices in geographical promixity talking with eachother directly.
Even maths may tell you that peer-to-peer processing can make a lot of sense: How would a server farm look like that beats 1 billion 500Mhz processors?
Does Peer-To-Peer functionality make sense on Android?
What do you think?
(Hint: If you take part in the Android goldrush challenge don't waste time using a shovel when you can use an excavator).
Related Content on this site
Why Android will start the mobile Tornado
Android brings handsets to the next level - and open doors a mile wide for db4o
db4A - database for Android
Android Password Manager Demo Application
Ideas for the Android Developer Challenge