I've been using the same Android phone for over a year now, a HTC Desire. Over the last year I've been sending and receiving texts on a frequent basis. My SMS app seems to struggle with the volume of messages it is now holding, over 5000+, so I thought I'd find a way of backing them up and clearing it all out in an effort to speed things back up.

This article explains how I used the 'Backup to Gmail' application to backup all my SMS and MMS messages.

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A common theme with the Android software platform is memory usage. Googling 'Android memory' will return a load of hits on how to optimise your memory usage, or how to free up more memory.

With the growth of the Application markets for Android I've been encountering more and more memory issues. Users want more Apps, and those Apps are becoming bigger and bigger, or are using third party plugins to run.

To effectively develop for the Android platform you should really consider how the system memory works.

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I've got a HTC Desire Android handset and I use the Twitter Application that ships with it, Peep. Recently it stopped logging in for me, after a quick search around online it looks like Twitter have finally made their OAuth login authentication mandatory for third party applications.

This is a good thing in itself, but it does raise the question of when a platform changes from being just 'open' to being so wide spread that it is considered as a public API. I'm not in a position to comment on why Peep wasn't updated to work with OAuth before it was released, but it does make you question who is responsible for maintaining the service levels of public API's.

If Twitter have published and promoted their API, surely it is their best interests to maintain its functionality, and ensure some level of backwards compatibility? This is a tricky point to argue, as on one hand it is very good that they are maturing their platform with new features and security, but on the other hand they do risk alienating the community they rely on by introducing new features that require third party application changes. By this I mean changes that require an update, and are not backwards compatible, rather than just not updating and missing out on any new functionality.

This is especially prominent in this instance as it affects the Twitter Application that actually ships with HTC Android handsets, so it is guaranteed to be quite widespread.