Things to Consider Before Starting Android Application Development - MAD

Hey there ready to create your first  stunning android application with kotlin or may be java, well its up-to you in this post i am not really going to convince you to choose kotlin over java or vice versa , this post is completely dedicated to you to prepare yourself for android application development and here we will discuss some points like what are the skills  you need before jumping into android app development, and choosing the development environment, i think i have already shared a glimpse about setting up the development environment for android development here you can always check, also one important thing Android test environment Emulator or A real device, so these are the things we will be sharing in this post

Android development Kotlin or Java or Others :

So as i said before i am not going  to make this post all about convincing you to switch to kotlin bu, i will share some important tings to consider, as you may already know that google announced Kotlin as their prefered language to develop android applications, and with that you can see all the documentations were avalaible for kotlin so there is no worry in that part and as a deveoper kotlin really reduces the bolier plate code, and as tech entusiast you might want to learn and experience some new languages, if you’re like me then i would definetly recommend kotlin, and as you can see from kotlin website it is not only for android development you can do much more with kotlin like using it with Javascript a web development language, and some important features per se Kotlin is a  type safe language where one the “Billion Dollar Mistake” (null pointer exepeiton) as stated by Tony Hoare , which can be avoided, and trust me as java developer you will love these features for a glimpse below we share a sample code of a simple hello world program code in Kotlin VS Java,

HelloWorld.java
class HelloWorld{
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println(“Hello World”);
        }
}

HelloWorld.kt
fun main(args: Array) {
    println(“Hello, World!”)
}

And the outpput is same “Hello World” this is not a big difference in code but you can see that it already reduces one line (Yeah,geek i know thats becasue of the class), like this there are lots of thing that were already taken care for you in kotlin, you will see more once we started coding , so stay tuned .

Well now lets compare a button click code in android :

MainActivity.java

final Button button = findViewById(R.id.button_id);
button.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
public void onClick(View v) {
Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(),”Hey Im Java”,Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
}
});

MainActivity.kt

button.setOnClickListener {
val message2 = editext.text.toString()

Toast.makeText(applicationContext, message2, Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show() }

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Well i think here the code speaks for itself, so what do you say, lets learn kotlin!! Yeah thats what im thinking

So now that you got a clear picture about choosing the language for android whether it is Kotlin or Java ?

Wait !!! there is still a more…? What ? Yes there is one other popular way to develop android applications which is native development well using some other language mostly javascript to create application, yeah there are some good development frameworks out their to develop android application with javascript which are none other than React Native, Ionic, Flutter etc., these are the frame works used to develop andorid application, the good thing about these framework is they support cross-platform and web application all in a single code base, and if you’re familiar with javascript i would say try react native, but you’re not here becasue of that is’nt you ? . Okay so there are still some debates going on whihc framework is best, but you cant compare kotlin /java with these frameworks so lets stick with kotlin

Development Environment:

Well in here also we have a debate going on between developers which is best development in general and i you take android on the other hand i would say software is not a mater at all, for android development all you have to consider is your hardware because android studio itself takes lots of ram, so i would suggest minimum of 8 GB of RAM  and if you want to run in emulators then go for 16 GB of RAM, it would be helpful.

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Emulator vs. Android Devices:

Once you typed your first hello world program in android you might want to check the output in action, in android we have two options for that one is using Android Emulators, and the second one is Real Android Devices. As they both have their pros and cons i would suggest like this always start with a real device for testing android application and you can simply move to emulators once you completed your application for cross device comparability different screen layouts and much more..

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And if you’re using latest android studio with a Intel processor, you might get this feature HAXM which will accelerate the hardware for android emulators, also you can set the size of the RAM which the emulator will use see image below

Here are some of the highlights of using real device:

• You can log the real response time of the application
• Get hardware features
• Get device specific features

And for the emulators :

• Test on different devices , even the one you dont have
• Always available

Well i couldn’t think of more but, bottom line is as a beginner you might want to start testing your application with real android device, that would speed up the development as well as more free ram for development

This post will be updated if necessary

Did i miss something ? Let me know on the comments…

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