AndroidSummary

GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT ANDROID

The general information about android is based on the following concepts:

Android as Operating System

Android is a mobile operating system that has been developed by Google Inc., Open Handset Alliance and free software community. It's a GNU/Linux based mobile OS with Apache 2.0 license. Supported platforms are ARM, MIPS, and x86. Google has been produced some mobile phones with Android OS, but not directly. HTC, Samsung, and LG are the companies that produced these Google phones which are called Nexus.

JAVA for Android Development

Android application development is based on JAVA object oriented programming language. Google has released their own SDK (Software Development Kit) on JAVA. People who develop native Android applications use this SDK. They can also develop applications by supporting cross-platform such as PhoneGap by using HTML5. These applications are applicable to all mobile platforms. Google was supporting Eclipse as IDE, but now, Android Studio 1.0 has released and Google supports it now. This IDE is based on IntelliJ.

Real Devices and Emulators for Android

Developed Android applications can be tested on real devices and emulators. If the developer wants to test it on a real device, the OS platform is important. If OS is GNU/Linux or OSx, you can plug the device and run the application on it. However, if your OS is Windows, you must be installed ADB driver which belongs to your mobile phone on your OS. Meanwhile, you can use some emulators. One of these was belongs to Eclipse IDE, but people do not prefer it because of its speed. It is really slow. So, most of developers prefer Genymobile emulator, because it installs the Android emulator on virtual machines, and it's quite fast.

Third Party Libraries for Developing Android Applications

There are third-party libraries that can be used while developing an Android applications. Android uses Gradle to import and use these libraries. You can also develop a library and publish it on Gradle. When a library is open-sourced and published publicly, everyone has a chance to use it and develop it and fix some bugs of it. So, it's really important to publish it publicly.

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