Developing Native Android Applications: Not as Hard As You Might Think

Two months ago, my boss asked me to try and build a native Android application based on the mobile website I had created for the university's annual Maryland Day festival. Both he and I are part of an IT initiative in our department tasked with figuring out how best to provide IT services to smartphone users on campus, and while we have in-house expertise in iPhone development, none of us were familiar with what would be involved in building Android applications. So he asked me to give it a shot.

I started by going to the official Android developer site:  http://developer.android.com/index.html. I downloaded the Android SDK per the site instructions, then downloaded and installed the Eclipse plugins for doing Android development, and the files needed to work with the Android API I was targeting in my application. I went through the "Hello World" tutorial, where I learned the basics of starting an Android project in Eclipse, how to configure a simple layout, and how to run the device emulator. After going through a few more of the layout-oriented tutorials, I realized that I was missing out on a few of the concepts being discussed, so I stopped coding and started reading through the development guide pages on the site, where I learned about the different components you can use in Android applications, what they were used for, and how to use them.

After spending the first few weeks just learning from the documentation and the tutorials, I started to focus more of my attention on how to accomplish the tasks I needed to make my particular application work. The developer site didn't have examples that addressed some of the issues I needed to solve, so I starting searching the web. Sometimes I found exactly the answer I was looking for on an Android development forum. Other times, I was able to cobble together an approach based on answers to similar issues on all-purpose tech forums like StackOverflow. I was always able to find at least a clue, something that would point me to the right package in the API documentation. I also had to stray from the Android developer site anytime I needed to learn more about Java coding itself, as it's kind of assumed that the developer is confortable with Java programming (an incorrect assumption in my case).

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