DeveloperTech spoke to Liyan Chang, the CTO of Filepicker.io to discuss the basics of Android apps prior to his appearance at Apps World North America.
It’s “the world’s most popular mobile platform”, according to the Android Developers site, and there’s plenty of research to show the Google OS’s dominance.
Last month Strategy Analytics released research showing that 1.3 million Android devices are activated every day, as opposed to 515,000 iOS devices, and similarly back in August IDC revealed that Android powers 68.1% of all smartphones shipped.
Evidently, the market for developers is a huge one, but what are the keys to building apps on Android?
As the CTO of Filepicker.io, Chang is responsible for the product and engineering wings of the company – in other words, the back-end infrastructure, and the iOS and Android libraries. A perfect voice, therefore, for discussing the good and bad of building with Android.
“Because Android is open source, there’s a lot more you can do with it,” Chang explained, adding: “The modules are spread out, there are a variety of sources and topics. With iOS there’s only so many things you can do; it’s well charted, as opposed to Android which tends to be more like an open field – much more free.”
Of course, when thinking of the difficulties in Android apps, an immediate difficulty arises in fragmentation, interoperability and testing. Chang agrees but notes a word of caution to the doomsayers.
“I think a lot of the standard arguments against developing for Android tends to be ‘oh, there’s so many devices, and it’s so difficult to test across all of them’,” said Chang, adding: “I don’t think that’s true – I think that can all be solved with tooling.
“It’s actually interesting to see the number of devices that you need to test for Android, and these are significantly higher than iOS. Now as Apple continues to provide more and more form factors, you’re seeing the balance point tipping a little bit.
“And because Android had this problem there are a lot of tools – so it’s an interesting balance that has shifted.”
Chang continued: “[But] I think one of the more difficult parts for the Android developer is a general awareness. I don’t think there’s a strong, core community, one place to go; there’s a lot more places, they’re a lot more spread out.”
So what would the advice be for someone building on Android – or mobile – for the first time? Spend an entire day not using a computer, according to Chang.
“When you’re used to having two 30 inch screens, you don’t understand the concept of how important each pixel is until you’ve spent a day doing everything on the phone or tablet,” explained Chang.
He continued: “The language, and the tools, [are] all very similar; there’s some small things but as a programmer you can pick that up relatively quickly.
“What takes time and some learning is understanding the differences in product choices you have to make, when you only have 1200 pixels overall as opposed to a couple of thousand on your PC.”
Liyan Chang is appearing at Apps World at the Moscone Center, San Francisco on February 7-8 imparting his industry knowledge alongside 200 industry experts across the world of multi-platform apps. For more information on how to attend, visit: http://www.apps-world.net/northamerica
