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Android App Development : An Overview

More than one billion phones are currently running on Android platform, a repository of opportunities for avid app developers. Besides, the mobile operating system is heading towards expanding its boundaries to smartwatches, cars, laptop, kitchen devices etc. What this current and future Android-based development implicates is that if you have passion for app development, you can mint a lot of money by developing Android apps that suit user’s requirements and add a quotient of convenience to their lives.

There are many questions that emerge in one’s mind, especially if you are developing your first Android app. However, you can find answers to all your queries related to Android app development through app development communities.

Java is used as the programming language for developing Android apps, along with the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) . However, other languages like C and C++ can also be used to develop Android apps by using Android Native Development Kit (NDK), but Google does not promote that. Google says that the NDK is not apt for Android apps as its drawbacks outweigh benefits.

With the introduction of new software (Gradle, Android Studio) and New OS (Android 5.0 Lollipop) last year, Google had ensured that developers were no longer required to deal with mind-boggling complexities of Android application development.

Android Studio has now become the favorite integrated development environment (IDE) for Android app developers, who had faced a lot of troubles with its predecessor - Eclipse. It was not less than a nightmare for developers to use Eclipse for more complex projects due to it being buggy, slow and unfriendly. Unlike Eclipse, Gradle does not crash while exporting an apk. You also don’t need to restart Android Studio after using it for long consecutive hours.

Google also replaced Apache Ant, a software tool for automating software build processes, with Gradle. According to Google, Apache Ant is an old technology and was not a fit for Android Studio.

Advantages of Android Studio over Eclipse are as follows:

User interface design in Android Studio works faster, gives quick response to changes and allows you to choose from more customization options that, unlike Eclipse, are not needed to be manually set in the XML.

With Android Studio, you are not required to restart whole IDE when you want to switch to a different project. This is the constraint with Eclipse and requires developers to select workspaces that contain their projects. Android Studio, on the other hand, works on the concepts of modules that can have their own Gradle build files. For example, an app, a downloaded library and an Ad SDK could behave as three different modules.

Android Studio works on Gradle, which is a better project automation tool than Apache Ant being used for Eclipse. Gradle allows android developers to divide apps into different flavors, signing with correct configuration, defining external dependencies etc.

Android Studio is more stable and performs better than Eclipse, which requires to refresh project, clean project and even worse, restart Eclipse. Moreover, the amount of RAM and CPU power to back Android Studio is lesser than what is required for Eclipse.

Android Studio allows better code completion than Eclipse and helps produce accurate results, always.
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