My view on Android development in 2015

Recently I've done an Android project in which we developed a tutorial series on how to create an intermediate level Android app with REST integration and gradle dependencies. This has allowed me to get reacquainted with Android after a couple of years of non-android projects. In 2009 I created my first Android application using the Android 1.5 SDK and dear me, a lot has changed in the mean time.

Android has really grown to be a mature platform for software development. Even though it was built on the heavily battle tested Java, the API's to the Android internals were still quite rough. As an added disadvantage resources on this new platform were very slim, everyone basically just reinvented the wheel themselves.

One of the biggest improvements that recently came to my attention is the new Android Studio. Switching from eclipse to IntelliJ's IDEA environment really helps take Android development experience to the next level. The installation is painless and the base set of SDK packages gets installed automatically. Integration with the ADB / DDMS debugging and logcat is very well done which gives you a lot more grip on development than in the olden days.

In between my Android 1.5 and Android 5.0 experiences I've spent a lot of time with Composer (PHP) and npm (Javascript). Finally, Android now has the package manager it deserves, which is called Gradle. Even though it was already possible to include third party jars before, projects were always scattered all across the web / maven / google code / random svn downloads.

The new centralized way of adding dependencies to your projects makes it much more fun to work with and helps you focus on stuff that is unique for your application instead of doing the same thing others have done before. Want to integrate with REST API? Grab the Retrofit library. Quickly load an image into your image view? Let universal-image-loader do the heavy lifting for you.

All in all developing in Android was quite a lot more fun than I anticipated before. I can definitely recommend giving it another shot with the new development setup, especially if you are interested in doing the stuff that is not quite available in hybrid apps yet such as integrations with wearables, ibeacons, nfc and other types of new mobile technologies.