The Android platform has millions of users and is growing each day. With this growth so do the number of people that want to explore the platform by creating their own Android app. While a lot of those people are professional software developers, there are many that have little to no experience in developing and publishing software. This led me to write this series on creating your own Android app: “Creating your own Android app, from vision to reality” In this series I will be covering the development cycle from concept to deployment. I Will give my recommendations on what steps you should undertake to get your app to the public. Keep in mind this series is meant to be a helpful guide and not a set of instructions that should be followed exactly step by step. Try out what steps work best for you and in the I hope you will have a software development cycle that gives great results. In this post I will be covering the planning stage. If you have not yet read the previous chapter “Concept” I advice to read that post first:
All of your ideas are written down and now you want to start creating the app. Planning is one of those steps most small teams or individual developers skip. And that’s a shame because planning will help you to actually release your app and get updates done on time. With good planning your project will more likely see an actual release and help you save time. So spend some time and keep your project within budget. If you are working in a team, I can recommend the following books on this subject.
The first thing I like to do when I start a new project is to create a road map. This will guide me trough the process of maintaining the app and knowing when certain features will be released. I Like to view the road map more as a guideline than a carefully planned schedule. Now I must address that the flexibility to deviate from the road map depends on the flexibility of your company or team, if you are a single developer than you have much more flexibility than working in a large company. To start writing your road map just take your feature list and divide your features into groups. For example you can have a group with social network features, or features like sorting, backup and restore, etc. Try find relations between the features, for example you cannot sort a list of items if there is no way to add items to a list. These relations will help you determine the order of development of the features. Now take all of these features and groups and mark them by importance. The importance of a feature can be determine by the following questions “Will the app be usable without this feature” (must have) or “Does this feature bring something unique to my app” (great for marketing). You can now divide the features into versions of your app. The first version of your app should only contain must have features. (you don’t have to actually release this version to the public) Try to include a whole feature group in one release, while also try not to put too many features into each version. It’s better to have ten versions with only a few features than to have two that will take forever to develop. The key to this process is to get your app to grow into that ultimate app you visualized before. Many but small releases will also re-leave you or your team from stress. Large releases with many features are much harder to plan correctly and need much more testing. By developing many small incremental releases you will find that you will be more in control over the whole process and less likely to run out of time before a deadline. padding deadlines to your road map can help specify when a certain feature must be completed. For example if you have an app that catalogs all kind of candy you might want to have a version that contains a feature to buy candy online out before Halloween. But if you do not have much experience in developing apps setting deadlines might be a hard task, so I would advice new developers to only set a deadline on your first version if they are forced by budgets.
Java is one of the most popular programming languages that has been taken as the future of IT industry. It is based on the OOPs (Object Oriented Programming) concepts and just the best choice for the people who already know the OOPs basics. If you want to learn Java, there is no way around except OOPs. Java is almost everywhere and a plenty of tools are written in Java to use for the enterprises.
For the android developers, Java is just the right way to go ahead. With Java, android app development gets easier and you would be able to develop more functional apps over time. Even if you wanted to work with large Companies then don’t try to become the Jack of all trades but mastering of a single programming language would be enough to excel in your career. As the android developer, here is a quick list of skills that every recruiter wants to see on your resume –
If the skills sound compatible with your current knowledge then congratulation, you are already on the right roadmap. If not, then you don’t have to get upset because we are going to explain the right career path that works just awesome for every Android Developer.
When you are working as an Android app Developer, the role and responsibilities depend on various factors like Company needs, your experience, and the project you are working on. Here is a snapshot of job role and responsibilities that are usually performed by all android developers while working with a reputed IT Company.
Based on the experience and industry types, the average salary of an Android Developer generally varies from $76K to $160K. There are a plenty of factors that can affect your salary range like qualifications, skills, knowledge of the tools, last drawn salary, previous Companies etc.
The two most important factors that need to consider at the priority includes – size of the industry and your IT skills. Below we have given a graph to give a better understanding of the concept that focuses on two popular factors only and gives you a perfect idea how much you can earn as an Android professional.
