Android Saga: Pull to Refresh revisited
06/27/2012 § 3 Comments
Previously on Android Saga..
“I find the solution very bizarre, but it worked out and that is what I am using right now. The only thing that still upsets me, is that the feature is not polished enough. It is still sluggish to pull, flicks once in a while, and lacks animation.”
It happens I was wrong. Yesterday I tested the app on the device – precisely a Samsung Galaxy i5500 running API Level 8 – and I was surprised when it didn’t work since all this time I was testing on an emulator running the very same API Level. I know the emulator is different from the device. This is true for the iOS simulator as well. But not THAT different.
Anyways, Johan’s implementation doesn’t work either on Samsung Galaxy i5500 running API Level 8 nor Samsung Galaxy S2 running 4.0.3 (Yes I tried a newer version to see if I was pushing to hard by using an old API version).
I got to a point where I started to think that maybe pull to refresh wasn’t the answer for Android. Actually my girlfriend asked me if I was not trying to put an iOS app into Android. And she had a good point: Android doesn’t support bouncing in the list view, so Android users are not used to pull the list hence they don’t easily discover how to pull to refresh.
Discussing this matter with some co-workers, I was presented with a list of well known Android apps (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn…) that actually do a very good pull to refresh. This convinced me that Android apps can be as good as iOS apps.
So I kept looking for other pull to refresh implementations. In the end, I got to Chris Banes’s library.
This time as soon as it worked on the emulator, I tried on both devices I have here and it worked pretty well. In fact, it is as good as Twitter’s pull to refresh.
Now, the interesting fact is: Chris Bane’s implementation needed 6 Java classes (and they are not tiny), 8 XML files and 2 images. His implementation is very interesting and truly had outstanding results. BUT this is TOO MUCH WORK FOR SUCH A SIMPLE FEATURE!
Knowing there are developers and developers (although this guy deserves respect since he is the only one that got a – open source – pull to refresh to properly work on Android), I tried not to think: “On iOS it would take a class for the header view and another to use it. Really.”.
Instead I googled for the Twitter APK file, downloaded it and decompiled it (a pretty painful process – by the way – that requires decompressing the APK, converting smil files to dex, from dex to jar and finally to Java source files). Of course, I wasn’t able to just grab and use their implementation, but that was enough readable code to see that they use just about the same number of files that Chris Bane’s does.
I am sure every file has its meaning and need, but still too much work for this feature. And just to be sure we are in the same page, I am not counting any i18n files neither assets for supporting multiple screen densities whatsoever.
Anyways, I learned two things on all of this:
1. Android apps can be as good as iOS apps
2. #1 requires a lot more work than it takes on iOS (and I am not talking about device fragmentation)
For those that like references, here are the best pull to refresh libraries I tried on Android:
https://github.com/chrisbanes/Android-PullToRefresh
https://github.com/johannilsson/android-pulltorefresh
https://github.com/woozzu/RefreshableListView.git
https://github.com/erikwt/PullToRefresh-ListView
And the tools I used for decompiling Twitter:
http://code.google.com/p/android-apktool/
http://code.google.com/p/smali/
http://code.google.com/p/dex2jar/
http://www.varaneckas.com/jad/
iOS Guy 
Trying to compare the development of apps through Apk’s and IOS is like comparing apples to oranges. Yes similarities exist. But if you’re more familiar with one than another its going to make it lopsided
Yep. I know it is different and as an iOS developer, I feel this differences every day.
I think it is worth and cool to compare some aspects though, maybe developers coming from iOS to the Android world may find some comfort on this posts.
As you are the first Android developer that comments a post in this blog, I ask you if you find anything I am doing in the wrong way, please tell me 🙂
Thanks for the feedback!
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