The fact that these devs put so much time and energy into making something that I cannot imagine wanting to use for the reasons you describe makes me think that I have a very different relationship to my mobile devices than some other people do. Another example in the same vein is typing emails or docs. I don't ever type anything longer than a couple of sentences unless it's extremely urgent. But there are many people who don't seem to mind one bit!
Although, I could type natural languages, there's no way I'd be typing code. Simply the number of special characters required makes it very slow and frustrating. And if you need to be mobile, you can just buy Chromebook (or similar device), install Ubuntu/Arch/whatever and happy coding.
Maybe there is a market for commuters/travelers? Even then, I would prefer a large-screen laptop.
Yes, I know, one could move their phone between docks and that would be mobile, but bet this is a very rare case. If one has stationary terminals, I think it would be very unusual if they're used solely as a dock station — one's likely to also have a stationary computer attached to them.
I have been using a bunch of editors, and while many of them are great the mostly suffer from 3 main problems.
1. Capacity, most can handle a 200 file project, but they sieze up solid much beyond that.
2. Git and github integration is often poor, for some reason they all get ocd about dropbox and google drive integration, but fall apart on git or svn integration.
3. They need a good ssh client embedded, both to provide sftp capability, and to allow you to have one click access to your dev, staging and production servers.
Do you refer to some future possible Android or to the Android of today?
On a good day, how many people interact with Android with a mouse and without a touch screen to get real work -- programming or writing, say -- done? If your answer is more than a handful, then I'd like to ask you how you know that.
Pretty mobile and nearly the same size as my main development laptop.
So for that reason I'm happy to see mobile development tools being made, even if I don't plan to use them day-to-day quite yet.
I used to be quite productive writing on the road using a Handspring Visor Deluxe (more info for the young 'uns among you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handspring_%28company%29#Visor_...) with WordSmith (http://danbricklin.com/log/wordsmithreview.htm) and a Stowaway foldout keyboard (http://danbricklin.com/log/stowaway.htm). And that was on a 3" black-and-white display and a 16MHz single-core CPU! I know, right?
I wouldn't have wanted to program on it, but as a writing environment, it was fine. Now give me writing software of the same quality as WordSmith, a keyboard as good as the Stowaway, and my ho-hum Galaxy S3 with its 5" hi-res color display and a quad-core 1.5GHz CPU...
http://www.google.com/nexus/new/images/nexus9/N9-keyboardlow...
I believe those downloads are for first few hours since the app is only 1.5 days old. Play Store Install numbers are typically 1-2 days old and app was launched on October 14th.
I would agree that the tablet / phone is not an ideal platform for writing software or editing code; they are best suited for content consumption.
I also notice that the app is 19MB which seems massive to me for just a text editor and reuse of the built in HTML renderer?
Hopefully this does not seem too negative - just some issues I have with it before even installing it. The other AIDE interface (for Java) seemed alright when I briefly tried it on my Xoom, but it was most effective with a bluetooth keyboard; even then I quickly found the tablet UI limiting.
There are other development options on Android devices as well, including Terminal IDE (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spartacusr...) for a full command-line based development environment and DroidEdit (Free and Pro versions) (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aor.droide...) for a more GUI-oriented programmer's text editor.
For comparison, check out http://try.jquery.com/ if you haven't seen the wonderful progress lately.
My current recipe for developing on mobile: iPad/iPhone + "ServerAuditor" app + bluetooth keyboard + vi
