Get Started With Android App Development: Native vs Cross-Platform

Does not matter if you want to work for a big corporation or be a freelancer or start your own startup, you will find the requirements of the Android Application Developer.

This article is for all those who are looking to start their journey as an Android App Developer. Check below to know all the prerequisites to start your journey.

How should you start with Android Development?

There are a lot of ways to develop Android Apps. In the end, they can be separated into two groups: Native and Cross-Platform. With Native, you build apps targeting a specific operating system (in our case, Android) while using cross-platform frameworks, you can deploy your apps for multiple operating systems.

At the first glance, you might realize that cross-platform sounds a lot more cooler than their native counterparts but there are a lot more to native app development. Native applications tend to have higher performance, better functionality and a better user experience than their cross-platform counterparts.

Each operating system has its own SDK (Software Development Kit) and the native frameworks are built around the particular SDKs. Thus, you also get to know a lot about how the operating system behaves. Moreover, you will find a lot of third party open-sourced libraries for your native apps while it is quite limited in cross-platform frameworks.

Cross-Platform has its own advantages. Less time required to build apps for multiple OS, expenses are low and more reusable code.

If you are willing to choose the Native route, Java and Kotlin are the official programming languages prescribed by Google. For cross-platform, there are a lot of frameworks and each framework has its own programming language(s). Some of the popular cross platform frameworks are Flutter, React Native and Ionic.

I will be explaining a little more on how to start with Native Android App Development in the rest of the Article.

Installing Android Studio and JDK

Does not matter if you are going to use Java or Kotlin for your apps, you will require the Java Development Kit (JDK) in your PC. Then you can install the Android Studio, the official IDE for Android Apps, from here. Click here to download the JDK.

I will be discussing the pros and cons of going with Java and Kotlin in another article.

Hardware Requirements

You will be requiring quite a good desktop or laptop for Android App Development. Android Studio is quite a heavy IDE. While there are minimum specs mentioned in the official website of Android Studio, I find them quite off track.

I would recommend anyone who wants to get into serious Android App Development, go for a system that is powered by at least 8 GB of RAM (16 is recommended) and Intel Core i5 (8th gen) or AMD Ryzen 5 (2nd gen). Anything less might be good for learning but you might be facing troubles while you try to build projects.

An Android Phone is also recommended to test your apps. You do not need any particular specifications for the phone unless you are building apps that target a particular sensor or something similar.

You can develop Android apps on any of the popular operating systems viz. MacOS, Linux and Windows.

This is part 1 of the series. Stay tuned for future updates.