Learn step-by-step how to build an Android app
In July 2014, Google launched a free course on Developing Android Apps in collaboration with Udacity.
Reto Meier, Dan Galpin, and I teach you how to think like a mobile developer in this course. The best part? You learn by doing. We apply best practices to building the Sunshine app together step-by-step. Then afterwards you’ll build your own app for the final project.
Why this app?
After many hours of brainstorming filled with all sorts of random app ideas (pizza app, sandwich app, I guess we were hungry…), we chose to do the Sunshine app because weather is something that everyone can relate to. You have weather, I have weather, we all have weather!
More importantly, by the end of the class, we want you to be able to build a fully functional app that would talk to a server and display that information on the device. Many apps actually follow some type of model like this (i.e. news apps or social media apps). In our case, the Sunshine app retrieves information from OpenWeatherMap, a free weather API for developers.
A weather app allows us to cover other Android app development concepts as well. We walk through how to create list views, navigate between activities, leverage other apps using intents, store data locally on the device, use notifications, build responsive layout for different sized devices like tablets, and more.
Final project — dream big
You also have a final project to build an app, applying what you learned in the course. You can choose any topic, perhaps addressing a problem in your local community, and you’re encouraged to upload the app to Google Play. (The best part about building something is sharing it with others and seeing their reactions!) Most likely your final project may be an app that sends data back and forth with a server, so you can use bits and pieces of the Sunshine app source code as reference.
Get started
Click “View Courseware” on the Udacity course site to access course materials for free! ☺
https://www.udacity.com/course/ud853
Note: There’s a pre-requisite of some programming knowledge (see course overview page) in order to get through the class comfortably.
I’ll write more about the class in later posts. In addition to my co-instructors, thanks to the rockin’ Udacity team, Alex Lucas, and Mike Denny, with whom I spent many late nights and weekends mulling over lessons until we turned into zombies. And thank you to the colleagues at Google who helped us, and especially to the awesome students who are taking the class!!
