My trip into the world of Android Programming (with my first two apps)

Update: you can get these apps on Google Play now: Champions Quiz and Easy Metronome

I’m a newbie Android developer, having started about a month ago. I started by picking up a beginners Android book (for dummies!) and seeing how far I could get with it.

My device is a relatively crappy Samsung Galaxy Ace smartphone.

I got the SDK and environment set up and got a “Hello World” running without running into trouble. Then I worked through some example apps from the book, again without too much difficulty.

After that, with a very basic understanding of Activities, Intents, Views, and all that, I deviated from the beaten path, using Google when I needed help (which happened pretty often). I wanted to make something new (not copying someone else’s app idea) but still do things typical apps would do (better chance of Googling for help).

First App: Champions Quiz

This is an app for League of Legends players. In this game, there are more than 110 champions, each having 5 abilities — each with a unique name. This results in about 600 distinct abilities.

The goal of the quiz is to match the correct champion name, given the ability name.

Second App: Easy Metronome

This app is a fully functional, animated metronome. Drag the circle up and down to set the tempo like on a real metronome, and press a button and it goes.

The idea is, if you take a look on the Google Play Store for the metronome apps, they tend to have sliders, buttons, many needless customization options, and advertisements, making the interface feel extremely cluttered, given the small screen of the phone.

Instead of dozens of options, the Easy Metronome app brings you a more friendly interface:

My feelings so far on Android Development

There’s the good and the bad.

The good — Android builds on Java, a language I’m highly familiar with, dampening the learning curve for me. There are lots of tutorials for beginners on the web to get you started. At this stage, if you run into a problem, usually someone else has run into the same problem before; I didn’t have to ask any new Stackoverflow questions.

The bad — From the developer’s perspective, the Android tool chain feels buggy and unstable. Perhaps some of these resulted from me doing something stupid, some are annoyances, some are bugs that ideally the developer should never have to deal with. I’ll list a few of these problems, grouping them by where the problem manifests itself.

Problems showing up on the computer:

• Eclipse can screw up, and when it does, it is not obvious how to fix it. One day, without me changing anything, it suddenly refuses to build the critical R.java file. Fixing it took an hour of painful cleaning, rebuilding, importing, re-importing.
• Emulators are unusable. They take 15-20 minutes to boot up, and when they do their frame rate is 1-2 fps; they are unresponsive and frequently ignore keyboard input.
• Ran into an Eclipse bug where Logcat sometimes shows a blank screen. Restarting Eclipse does not fix it. The solution appears to be  to instead use the commandline tool “adb logcat”.

Problems showing up on the phone:

• I could not get the Face Detection API to work, even when using identical images and code that works for other people. (although I understand face detection is hard, so I’m not too upset)
• Ran into an Android bug where only the first line of text in an Alert Dialog is shown. The solution was confusing (involved switching to a different theme) with no explanation given.
• Ran into an Android bug where the text color was ignored, but only on some devices and not others. I haven’t bothered to find the solution to this.

Overall, Android programming is a mildly frustrating experience, compared to what I normally work with. It would be much better without constant minor annoyances and crashes / bugs.

What next

I originally wanted to make a bunch of apps and release them for free, but I later realized that Google charges $25 per developer to be able to publish apps. Being very cheap, I didn’t release any of my apps because of this.

I could try charging a small price (like $0.99) for the metronome app — I can’t imagine anyone paying for my league quiz app. Or I might make more apps and at some point release them all for free.