Anyone have any impressions, hints, tutorials from developing for Google Android devices? [closed]

Question

I have a T-Mobile G1 and I'm going to download the developer SDK and see if I can create a few simple apps for my phone. If you've done similar development, please answer below and tell me about your experience. Please share any links you found especially useful.

Answer 1

I didn't find the SDK documents to be all that helpful, at least at first. What really got be started was looking through the example chapters of The Busy Coder's Guide to Android from CommonsWare. You can find this on the book's website. The code examples for the book are also provided at that link.

The example code provided in those examples, plus the example code included in the SDK gave me a good idea of where to start. I'm still not totally solid on a lot of things, but development is going a lot faster than it was beforehand.

One thing you definitely want to be sure you do is watch the videos provided by Google. The application life cycle for Android is much different than a traditional application, so you want to make sure you understand was Intents, Views, and Content Providers are. These videos can all be seen on YouTube in this playlist.

The last helpful resource I can point you to is the blogging community. Every now and then, Planet Android and Hello Android have code excerpts from the blogs they aggregate. Jeffrey Sharkey is big into Android development and has released some useful code on his blog.

Android development currently is much like shooting in the dark, but it will hopefully take off soon and provide us with more valuable resources! I know there are a few books out there. Good luck!

Answer 2

The biggest thing I recommend is to make sure you really understand the lifecycle of android apps. Many apps are put out there which crash or perform badly (or make the entire phone run poorly) because they are not designed to follow the application lifecycle properly.

For simple apps it's nothing to worry about but soon you might want to run something in the background (play music, etc), or need to save your state if the user switches apps. It's tricky but makes sense once you see some examples.

You might also check out some of the Android sessions from the Google I/O developer conference in May:

• An Introduction to Android
• Building an Android Application 101
• Anatomy & Physiology of an Android