The development of android mobile apps is essential. Most of the smartphones in the world are using the Android OS. This implies that most of your target audience is on this platform. Whatever the goal of your business is, you need to present your offers to your prospective clients. Failure to do this could be the start of your business' downfall.
After deciding to create an Android app, you need to know features available for you to integrate into the app that you intend to develop. You should discuss everything that you want with your
app developers. However, we will tell you some of the features of Android app development.
Android App Development Features
1. Unlike iOS, you can't just take and port Android application to another mobile operating system by rewriting the code from one programming language to another. It is necessary to lay a completely different structure.
Another approach is observed in other aspects.
For example, a modern Android application icon may have a different shape depending on the settings of the operating system. The designer should take this into account and make sure that the logo looks beautiful and harmonious in all cases.
2. Material Design - a whole philosophy of building a user interface. The official documentation for this approach includes hundreds of documents detailing both its principles and specific examples of the correct and incorrect use of the rules for each interface element.
The button, navigation bar, icon, and all other elements must follow these rules if you want to create a beautiful material interface and receive an offer from Google to promote your mobile application on Google Play.
3. Google's recommended programming language for Android is currently Kotlin, not Java. The difference between them is significantly smaller than between Objective-C and Swift for iOS, but still, these are slightly different development approaches.
4. Testing on a large fleet of physical devices (not emulators) is extremely important. Even that does not provide trouble-free operation on all available models, which is a result of the huge number of different phones on the market. But at least, it reduces the likelihood of problems on the most popular devices.
Google Play App Publishing Policy
Before publishing to the
Google Play store, apps undergo much less rigorous control in terms of compliance with the requirements for building an interface, choosing a theme, and requesting personal user data.
Despite the fact that Google has recently changed the approach to checking applications, making it more thorough and more manual, the average application review time is 2-4 hours. This is significantly faster than 2-3 days in the case of the App Store.
Previously, many used this to promote the application. In the Android Market, a previous version of Google Play, there was a "New Apps" tab displaying updates in chronological order. Thus, the more often you updated the version of your application, the more downloads you received. Each update results in thousands of downloads, and in a month, you could achieve good results if the application is really useful.
Now the promotion of applications has become much more difficult. But first of all, you need to make a cool product, including in terms of the requirements of the Material Design concept.
Conclusions
The development of mobile applications for Android has the following specifics:
- Android is the most popular operating system in the world. As a result, the diversification of devices controlled by it is enormous. You need to make sure that the mobile application supports the vast majority of device models of the target audience.
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UI/UX should take into account not only different screen sizes of devices, but also work in multi-window mode and a pixel density of screens: a thin font on poor-quality displays will be distorted or completely disappear.
- The number of current versions of Android in use is many. You must consider all of the ones your target audience uses.
- When designing the interface, you must be guided by the concept of Material Design.
- Google's recommended programming language for Android is Kotlin.
- Testing on a vast fleet of physical devices is very important.
- You can set up your app developers' personal account and publish the application in 2-3 hours.
To develop a high-quality mobile application for Android is not easy; you need to consider many factors. However, it is equally important to solve a real, existing problem of people, and not to make the most common mistakes.
