Delving into Android Apps Development

I always had this frustration with native mobile apps, of never having had the opportunity to develop one. Maybe it was the lack of a real chance in my company or maybe lack of free time to do it. Anyways, Last week I decided to get through with something basic for Android and publish it on the Google Play market.


Fortunately, there is plenty of documentation on how to develop for the Android operating system, which made it all easier http://developer.android.com/index.html. And also the tools for development are free! On top of that the publication process is simple and pretty straightforward. I remember it being a lot more full of obstacles for iPhone apps when some colleagues at my old company were to publish their work on the store. But you just go to http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/publishing.html and that should be all you need. You have to purchase a "developer license" for 25USD. Which is in an attempt to avoid fake account creation for spamming purposes. And then you have to wait till your credit card transaction is cleared and your account approved. I did on Friday, and 3 days later, that means the next Monday the app was already published  on Google Play.


Compounder+

The application I wrote is a simple Compound Interest Calculator. With two basic views. An initial view where the user enters an initial balance, an annual growth rate, an number of years to quickly calculate the final balance.

....And a second view where the user provides the app with the initial balance, the final balance desired and the app calculates the average annual interest rate you need in order to achieve your goal.

The app was published under the Finance category and it is free.

Finally here's the source code in case you are a newbie like me and want to take a look. Just notice I developed this application using Eclipse as my IDE of choice.


And here's the link to the application.

Overall I couldn't say I loved the experience. After so many years with Visual Studio, I can say I'm a little spoiled and expected more out of the development environment, but it was not a terrible experience either. Now, with my curiosity satisfied I can go back happy to the obscure world of my databases, web services and .NET Development in general.