As much mobility as possible is whateveryone yearns for today and luckily we have great solutions to choose from; hundreds of devices, three main OS's; which one to go for? One of the Android developers in Qubiz talks about his experience with the platform, why we should choose it and what it can bring to our lives, but also what we in Qubiz can do for you if you decide you need someone to develop a mobile solution for your business.
Android is the mobile OS offered by Google, and has become the most popular mobile OS in the world. Being so popular, it enables companies who want to use or sell an Android application to have a huge targeted market of devices on which such an application can run. One downside for the spread of this OS is the different hardware and size each device can have, and it's something for which we, here in Qubiz, have invested a lot of energy and resources to be able to satisfy anyone's needs.
Since we talked about a huge market of devices, I need to also mention the application market which consists primariliy of Google Play Market and then the device manufacturers' markets, among which I can mention Motorola's, Samsung's and Amazon Kindle's.
One more thing that encourages the users to buy Android devices, and thus enlarges the potential market for applications, is the android.stackexchane.com website, where users can find answers to their issues or customization questions about devices.
Google offers a SDK and a NDK for application development which include an emulator supporting a large variety of vesions. The OS programming language is Java, which we know it's a quite well known language, and integration with Eclipse is also possible.
The documentation for developing Android applications can be found quite easily and a lot of sample applications can be found directly in the SDK.
The emulator and devices allow memory and CPU profiling which means that the developer or user can observe how the hardware is responding to different activities in the application.
There is also a website where you can find resources, tutorials, blog articles and a community https://developer.android.com .
Android is a very well thought platform to develop on and we managed to do great stuff with it. For instance an Android application can use activities from another application that is already installed, thus you don't need to write the same code again, and the OS helps you to find the desired activity.
Being developed by Google, integration with Google Calendar, Contacts and Mail is done by default and you can also integrate your application with Google services. One other great thing offered by Google is in-cloud user settings - you save your settings in the cloud and when you switch devices you don't have to re-setup you user settings.
I think the main advantage when developing for Android is that it uses the Java programming language and with knowledge in any other OOP language it makes the learning curve a lot easier.
There are some disadvantages though, the large number of API versions is one, there's an API version for each platform version. Also when it comes to extending an existing functionality offered by the SDK you'll find it to be quite difficult in the case of controllers. Then come the intents, which are abstract descriptions of operations to be performed, also quite difficult to work with. And lastly the SDK isnt't very helpful when developing games from the graphics point of view.
I found all this obstacles because I've put a lot of effort and dedication into Android development and I also passed them. Is the learning curve steep ? Might be, if you want to achieve great things; and in Qubiz we always want that, and we always leave obstacles behind and just deliver high quality solutions while having fun and doing what we love most.
Qubiz has extensive knowledge in Android development, with experience in the enterprise solutions market. We can offer a complete set of services on mobile application solutions so anyone can choose us for developing their Android mobile application with the utmost confidence that we will deliver.