What should a developer know before building cellphone apps?

Question

I want to start making cellphone apps with Android as first choice but not the only one. I have 10 years of experience with Java, C#, C++ in commercial applications and I know that many things and practices for this applications are not valid for cellphones. Where do I start reading? How do I adapt my way of thinking to this new environment as quickly as posible? I plan to make some money with it sometime in the future as an extra income or a career change maybe, who know. Any resource or advice you could recommend will be very welcome. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Just start with Android Developer site http://developer.android.com/index.html. It contains all you need for the beginning. Also take a look onto Commonsware android books, those are really great both for beginners and experienced programmers - http://commonsware.com/books.html.

Answer 2

Only support the TOP os's which generate income. So at this moment IOS and Android. Don't go down the path of Symbian and Java... it's dirty, and you won't like what you see down there.

Answer 3

I recently decided studying Android, and http://developer.android.com was a great resource. You should read the Application fundamentals doc first and User Interface documentations later.

There are some tutorials too.

I read the whole Application fundamentals, and that gave me a good idea of "how to program for Android" since it has its own architecture and environment. Get the idea of Activities, Services, Broadcast Receivers and Content Providers and try to adapt yourself to that structure. Then read about how Tasks work, and later go into UI.

As a subjective opinion, being Android so popular and growing, I don't think it's worth the effort to study Java ME or even C (I'd go for iPhone devel in any case with Objective-C). Android will probably give you more money and faster. Java FX might be interesting...

Answer 4

What really got me going was the Hello, Views documentation. Will really get you up and running instantly.

Answer 5

1. iPhone
2. Android
3. Samsung Bada

I would like to mention that iphone and Android communities are very much evolved and have a great developer community and resources. Samsung Bada doesnt have a good developer network nor does the SDK support many operating systems. I think it works only on Windows.

You need to first understand the mobile platform architecture, the different frameworks which the platform exposes to the programmers to develop applications.

There are emulators for you to test, however you have to have one of those devices to do a real time on-device testing.

With respect to programming, i think your experience is more than enough but one needs to come out of the frame of mind and think differently. A typical device has limited processing power, limited memory, limited screen space but the user demands beats expectations compared to desktop/enterprise software.

Lastly most important thing is the IDEA of the application. You may want to survey existing application on the stores and start thinking. You can also develop and application which would solve your problem with mobile devices and you know other users also may want such a application.

Answer 6

You could start with two great books listed as reference [1] (Ableson F. et al., Unlocking Android, 2009. Manning Publications Co., ISBN 978-1-933988-67-2) and [4] (Conder S. and Darcey L., Android Wireless Application Development, 2009. Addison-Wesley, ISBN 978-0-321-62709-4) in my degree thesis. Both have an extensive walk-through of Android, which you as a developer should know. You'll get all you need from "Hello World" to deploy an actual application in the Android Market.

Android is the place to start, since you already know Java and C# and C++. You can even use native classes in Java written in C or C++ if you have some useful standard classes in your library. More on Natives you'll find in the reference book [9] (Silva V., Pro Android Games, 2009. Apress, ISBN 978-1-4302-2647-5).

The best of luck!