Android phone for App development [closed]

Question

I'm planning to port a couple of my apps from iPhone to the Android platform.

I plan to build those from scratch on Android so there is no needed for portable tool from ObjectiveC to Java (if you know of such you can mention it).

I'm new to the Android platform and need some advice on which phone to buy for development. By the way, New games I'm developing are built with Corona-SDK so the platform must support it also.

Please help me with:

1. Which device would help me to develop more portable apps (that would work on more devices)? What I need to look there?
2. Which OS to look for?

Price is not an issue.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Well in theory you can develop Android apps without even owning an Android phone. There is an emulator option you can use to debug your apps. Here's some info regarding the emulator:

http://developer.android.com/tools/help/emulator.html

and here:

http://developer.android.com/tools/devices/emulator.html

You have said you are developing games (I believe), so an onscreen computer emulator won't really help you test "games" nicely. I don'r really know what you mean by

"Which device would help me to develop more portable apps (that would work on more devices)?"

In general any Android app is portable. If you want a phone/device that can handle "big" games, get a dual core device.

If you are looking for which OS version of Android is the most popular, so you can develop your apps to target a larger audience have a look at the stats here:

http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

Answer 2

It depends on the type of the application you will be developing. If you are going to follow all the design guidelines you should, in general, make your application look great on 4-inch phone, 7-inch tablet and 10-inch tablet (it is very general). So I recommend you to get Nexus devices, starting from Nexus 4 -> 7 -> 10.

One good thing about them is that Android newest updates are always available for them first and these devices are very widely used. You should also get some 2.2 and 2.3 devices; they will be pretty easy to get if they are not new, and the reason to do this is that they still occupy a great market share.