How did they do? Which language did you use? Any tips?
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I’ve made a few, none published, all for my own and some friends uses. I used just raw Java, the Haxe framework, and some C++ frameworks for different purposes for different apps. The big tip I can give is use the Android widget ecosystem properly or your app will not even remotely feel native or natural!
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At the beginning of my developer career, I developed some Android apps in Java while having no clue about Java or OOP. I somehow managed to put things together but the code was horrible.
Some years later, we had to work on a React Native app at work and it was a mess. The project only worked for two of us 3 developers at the same time. One person always had some issues. The whole ecosystem seemed broken with outdated packages and things that just don’t work as one might expect.
Last year I had to continue the development of an Cordova based app. Cordova didn’t get in the way too much and the app logic was written in VueJS. It was a decent experience but the “deployment” wasn’t that easy. We managed to get an Android APK generated, even though the Play Store complained about missing optimizations, etc. We never figured out how to properly generate the IOS version.
I am a big defender of native mobile apps. They just feel better and also look like proper apps on each system. This javascript “build once, publish for all platforms” concept is just a marketing phrase. But depending on the type of app one wants to build or the “quality” one wants to achieve, one might see that differently.
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I have built some very small and simple apps for myself. I used Java initially but always found it too verbose, I originally came from C# and was used to some nice syntactic sugar.
Recently I tried using Flutter and found that to be a much nicer experience. Also as a benefit my app worked on iOS as well without having to do anything special.
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Even Kotlin has taken over Java as the most used language for android development. Kotlin is basically just a different syntax on top of Java, but it is significantly nicer and handles some stupid decisions of Java like Null’s in a far far more sane way. I can whole heartedly say to use Kotlin over Java, they both work in the same places, never a reason not to choose Kotlin.
Scala I like even more, but it’s more… dense than Kotlin, and comes with extra standard library stuff. ^.^;
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I’ve been using Javascript with Titanium framework for some years and produced several Android apps for enterprise use. Recently I started playing around with Dart and Flutter and I’m really enjoining it, though I did not build anything for production yet. I’m quite happy not having to use JS so much now.
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I’m an engineering student in Chennai doing my 4th year in IT. Placements have started and I was already rejected from the interview round of a company which came to recruit app and web developers.
I have developed few apps while learning Android app development. One of my major apps was TravelOH - Android Apps on Google Play which I developed for my minor project in college. The basic idea of this app is to get the users in contact with people travelling from same location to same destination and at same time to share their expense. This app was built keeping in mind to help our college students to share their expense during traveling from our college to city. That’s why it has locations only around our college. Later it will have more functionalities in it.
I hope you give it a try and let me know what can be included and any bugs if you find.
Thank you.
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One at school, since I’ve never touched the Android SDK again.
Going from imperative to declarative UI was a natural move since the web does it a few years before.
Never been a fan of UIKit or how Android managed views.
https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose
But with Jetpack Compose I’d really want to test android dev.
Anyone has ever tried it?
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Will probably try this year using Kotlin 
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I’ve worked on Android apps in my last company using Xamarin / C#. I quite like Xamarin as its platform independent so any app will work directly on Android and iOS.
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I think we need a 2022 thread about Xamarin (vs others like Ionic and maybe even the new Elixir Desktop library) 
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I haven’t heard about Elixir Desktop yet. 
It’s a really interesting project and seems promising…
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Working with React Native for months. Feels good since I am a React guy 
P.S - On Devtalk after so many months 
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I just followed a few tutorials using Xamarin.Android a few years back. Only worked on an actual app with Xamarin.iOS.
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Tried Ruboto (Jruby) and Ionic, with some attempts using Lazarus too, finally landed on Dart and Flutter which aims to be a real multiplatform library (macOS, iOS, Android, Web, Linux, Windows).
I will try to replace it as my last, final language at least for desktop/mobile apps.
Till now I created only a couple of personal apps which would serve more to myself as examples.
Having suspended my studies months ago I hope to resume them very soon.
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That sounds good Aston, I just need some time to recap what I learned and maybe find a new small project to start from scratch so I can document it step by step.
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Great stuff - I will look forward to seeing it 
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yes but upgrading apps is very complicated. Recently planning to move to create some PWAs. However, iOS devices do not support those pretty well.
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My first app was recently released on the Google Play Store. Taxi Reed - A Taxi Dispatching Software.
Developing an app while attending college on a regular basis was a demanding task. The first hurdle I had to overcome was figuring out how to display taxis that are ready to hire on a map in real-time. After much digging, I discovered jqCab, a custom-made JavaScript plugin that makes it simple, developed by SpotnRides. Then I made a fragments navigation drawer activity, which contains a web view with an HTML page in it. As a result, my app is quite large but it is 70Mb in size.
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