App development

[johnnywildman]

Hello ,

Whilst I am fairly inexperienced with android software, I do have a data science background with intermediate programming skills.

I have a couple of ideas for a mobile app that I would like to bring to fruition. I was wondering whether anybody could please offer suggestions on where would be a good place to start.

Many thanks.

[simon-webb]

Hi Johnny.

The Android SDK lets you jump straight in with Java, if you know that already. If not, you might like to have a look at modern alternatives like Google's Dart and Flutter. These are nowhere near as widely used, and yet could still turn out to be a good investment, in terms of what you can do for the time spent learning, as they're cross-platform (you can develop not only for Android but for Linux, Windows, and MacOS desktops, as well as iOS) and Dart can be compiled/translated into Javascript. Even Python can be used for Android apps if that's the language with which you're most familiar...although I wouldn't recommend that as it isn't supported natively on Android. Finally, Kotlin is another officially supported Android development language that's often described as a quick, easy way to get into Android development, so you might like to have a look at that.

[remy-wehrung]

Well, let's make it simple: you avoid java, think more about web app: NodeJs server, html5 / css3 / reactjs / mariadb

[TheFu]

Google has lots of programming for Android tutorials. Youtube is full of them and I bet your local community college has a set of courses that will get you to an Android Programming class, eventually.

You can do whatever you set your mind towards, but most people will get sidetracked after a week when they realize learning to program takes months. Learning to program for mobile platforms in a non-toy way takes years. There are some very strange ways that Android works when compared to other computing platforms. It has to in order to save CPU, RAM, and battery. I know MIT has an all-in-one Android prototyping platform to make things a little easier. They may have a class on how to use it. When I looked into it, the system requested every possible OS permission, which would never be allowed in a commercial app placed into Google's app-store. For 10 users, that wouldn't matter. Just share the APK directly. For mass installations, you'd need to re-write the app and not use the MIT tool, but it could be used to get VC funding and attract existing Android experts, perhaps.

BTW, the Android version of Java is a little funny, but the most common IDEs used to build Android apps are all hogs. They want a $1500 desktop machine for each developer - fast CPU with lots of cores and plenty of RAM 32G+.