Android development – musings of a beginner

It’s been about 3 weeks since we first met, when my boss asked me to work with her on a few projects. It’s been wonderful and I think I’m starting to do a lot more than just projects with her. I think I’m falling in love with her. You ask me why….because she looks beautiful, she’s smart, she has a really nice flair about herself, I can be myself when I’m around her and she is a sweetheart to be with! I know what you are thinking…but I’m talking about Google Android you naughty fella…

On a more serious note, I’ve been working with Android for a very less time, but “I’m lovin it!” So how did I get into Android development? I’m currently working with the good folks at Hibiscus Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd. (from January 2010 actually) and there, I got the opportunity to work with Palm WebOS, iPhone (didn’t do much – just a bit of learning) and finally Android.

In this post, I want to share with you a few thoughts on why I like Android (as a user and developer) and why I think that it has a lot of potential. So here we go…

It’s open source

Android, being an open source operating system built on Linux makes it possible for anybody to port it to any device from a mobile phone to __________ (fill the blank with your device). So what’s the advantage? The advantage is that as more and more devices implement the operating system, I as a developer can make applications that run on all these platforms without much work.

This raises an interesting question – “Why did Google implement it on a mobile phone first?” Read the answer as told by Andy Rubin (Vice president of Google mobile platforms) here.

Added to this, the Open Handset Alliance makes it all the more interesting.

The phone is awesome

I was able to get my hands on Google Nexus One and so far I don’t have any complaints with it. In fact, I love the interface and the simplicity of the design more than anything. Check out some videos on the YouTube channel to see for yourself.

Even from a developer point of view, I really love the OS because:

Again…open source

…which means that you have a huge community if you need help with anything.

An elaborate SDK

The development SDK of the phone is really big. That of course means a steeper learning curve to get acquainted with all the available features, but once the learning is done, you can do a lot of things.

Development in familiar technologies/languages

The development is done in Java. XML is also used mainly when designing UI and setting project configuration. So if you are a Java developer, it will be a cake walk for you. You get all the OOP goodness and all you need to understand is the OS architecture, and your way around the API. Google is your best friend when it comes to getting more info.

For me, the easiest to learn was definitely Palm WebOS owing to the small API and the fact that all you need to know to develop for the platform are HTML, CSS and Javascript. Since I have knowledge of these, it was easy. Android is a bit tough because of the big API and more elaborate development methods. iPhone is a completely different story because of the tools, language (Objective C) and of course the SDK’s availability on Windows (not available). So I couldn’t explore it much.

Flexibility

The SDK gives you, as a developer, a lot of flexibility as far as your design/development approach is concerned. For example, when designing a UI, you can do it using simple XML files or code a Java class. This gives you the freedom to define the UI in a way as required by your application.

It’s from Google

So I’m sure they’ll have a bunch of big ideas as to what they want to do with the OS. The Google phone is definitely just the beginning.

There are many more reasons why I like Android, but these are the most important ones that make me want to work with the platform for as long as I can.

So why did I post this?

Well, I realized that a lot of guys and gals out there are getting started with Android development and so I want to share whatever I’m learning on this blog. So I’ll write tutorials, how-to’s, tips and tricks (or whatever you like to call them) on various aspects of Android development. This post is a curtain raiser for the same and I’d love to hear from you, any ideas on the things like topics that I can cover, etc.