Finally I´ve completed my first Android app and published it to Play Store. It didn’t take that much time to do but you know how things get placed on a shelf, and when they do, well they sit tight.
Now it´s there though and by naming it “Track my training” I assured no one would ever, ever, ever find it 🙂 seems the words “track”, “my” and “training” are amongst the most popular out there but if you search for that exact title it shows up on second place at least. Here´s a link to the store page.
Here is some thoughts on Android development after enduring the first few hours of “getting-into-it”:
Its really not that hard
not more or less than doing anything else. If you are to use complex patterns and reusability, you would do it in the same way as you would in any other development. If you are to “hack something together” you can aswell
From .Net to Java – pieceácake
I´m a .Net developer (mainly) and having programmed both VB, Javascript, PHP and C++ the transition from .Net to Java is by far the smoothest one. The thing is if i´m not mistaken C# is (or was) very much inspired by Java in which sense syntax and main design patterns (everything inheriting from object-baseclass, no multiple inheretence, implementation from interface etc) are very alike. Most things could be googled and bypassed in matters of minutes. The only thing I found really frustrating was the lack of common libraries. In .Net we get most things served on a platter whilst in the Java world I think you need to search a bit more to find these things. For example, searching collections, advanced string methods etc that we´ve all come to love in Linq are nonexistent from scratch which is frustrating. It´s not hard to circumvent but annoying since it´s there for free in .Net.
Good designer tools but no codebehind generation
Coming from Visual studio to other IDE´s is always a pain. Later editions of Visual Studio is in my eyes the best developing platform out there (given that you know the tool of course). It´s fast and serves you everything including auto generating members and stuff from your visual designer tools. In eclipse this doesn’t work the same, stuff do get generated from the designer but only as id-references which you use to retrieve objects and I think this is a neat way of solving compile-time errors of control references but I would´ve like to take it one step further and actually generated type-safe accessors to these controls like you get in Win- or Webforms. The issue here is that you always need to manually retrieve and cast your controls in codebehind which you´ll probably want to do for most named controls.
Publishing to store
Finally the process of publishing to store. Certainly makes me understand why there´s scores and scores of apps in the Play Store. It´s dead easy. I created my account (or rather linked it to my gmail like you do with all google features), payed developer fee and uploaded my app, all done in like 15 minutes and after that my app was in the store a couple of hours later. Dead simple, blazing fast. I imagine this smooth process will make my attempts in the other stores bitter 🙂
Summary is, android development, a bit frustrating of course but when you´ve got the hang of it, quite simple and nice. Good job Google. So check my app out, it´s nothing grand or maybe even useful 🙂 but it serves my purposes and I think it´s a good demo of something that you might throw together in a a couple of days.