Droid Incredible Support: Coming Soon, please be patient.

[tliebeck]

After spending three hours calling Verizon stores, Best Buys, and other cell phone stores, and another two hours driving 100 miles in SoCal semi-rush-hour traffic, I now have an HTC Droid Incredible in my possession.

This phone will certainly be throwing developers for a loop. Before its existence, all Android handsets had a *single* storage area: the SD Card. The Incredible is the first Android phone to provide a truly separate internal storage area*, and it's going to be very difficult for app developers to adapt their applications quickly to meet its needs.

*: One of the Samsung devices, I forget which, also has internal storage. In this case though the internal storage behaves as though it's an SD card, so developers did not experience an issue. The HTC Incredible does not do this.

Virtually every application in existence on the Android market which writes data to the user storage space will have trouble with this device. All the media databases that index your music, photos, and videos will need to be accessed differently. Some applications (e.g. WebSharing) will additionally need to be modified to enable the user to take advantage of both storage areas.

Please be patient with developers in adding support for this phone. There is essentially ZERO documentation available for how to develop for this phone at the present time. HTC has made a grave error here.

It's a non-issue for professional developers with thousands of sales/month to go pick up a new phone like this and pay full retail for it (if they can find one). But the smaller folks (and those who write free apps) are going to have a much tougher time stomaching $529+tax (in the US, they *all* bought Moto Droids, so they're stuck in contracts). And from what I've seen from a few hours of ownership, buying this phone is the only way one is going to be able to support it. The Android emulator has no support for such features.

If you're a developer and are looking to add support for this phone, I highly recommend this thread:
HTC Incredible no default external storage? - Android Developers | Google Groups

[ldimick]

Interesting post. Thanks. I wonder if other manufacturers will follow this hardware model. I have always liked HTC phones but this does not sound like progress. They should have included some sort of compatibility mode so that internal storage would appear as external for older apps.

[tliebeck]

1.6.0 final is now out in the market, please report any bugs!