As developers get to grips with the Android SDK, we’re beginning to see fledgling apps and promises to support Google’s platform emerge from the coding community.  It’s not all Google Maps mashups, either; Stephane Daury, for instance, has done an initial port of the WPhone mobile WordPress client, finding himself surprised in the process by how straightforward it has been (even without taking a touchscreen for granted). 

“I was getting all geared up to start taking on the challenge of fully supporting the rich interface on the Android platform … But now having found the time to download the cross-platform SDK and trying it on my development sandbox, I’ll venture to say that it might just be a bit easier than I thought” Stephane Daury, WPhone Admin Plugin

Meanwhile, the shocking sight of Skypop’s Bruce Leak in shorts (you can see the video after the cut) only vaguely detracts from how impressive their preliminary exploration of Android has been.  Day one, apparently, coder and CTO Timo Bruck bypassed the “hello Android” test app and instead whipped up a Sudoku game; day two, he was onto friend-finding services similar to the Buddy-Beacon on Helio cellphones.

The friend-locater evolved into a basic geocaching game, with “hidden treasure”, monitoring of other players and even the ability to send taunting messages.  Yes, it’s nothing particularly earth-shattering, but considering it’s been less than a week since Google released the Android SDK package the progress is amazing.  A lot of it is down to the basic coding bricks pre-loaded in the Android firmware: in this case, location-calling and map-overlay APIs that mean programmers needn’t address the bare basics but can instead, as Bruck puts it, focus on the creative aspect of development.

Of course, not everybody has a swish Android reference-design handset to test their apps out on, but there are various emulators available as part of the SDK.