I just published my first Android app: Folder Downloader for Dropbox. The name should describe it pretty well. As it happens most of the time, I scratched my own itch.
This is my very first attempt at Android development. My verdict: it sucks. Not my app, Android development. Perhaps my app sucks as well, but that’s not the point.
The point is, Android development is complex, messy, quirky and unobvious. The documentation is horrible. Eclipse is awful, at least compared to Visual Studio. The emulators are slow as hell. Google Play’s Developer Console feels like it was slammed together by drunk monkeys (actually, that’s also true for the Android SDK itself).
But, I’m quite happy with the result. Being the paranoid nitpicker that I am, I can say I have achieved all the main objectives I had in mind (not requiring the user’s Dropbox password, mimicking the look-and-feel of the official Dropbox’s app, and running the download in background, via a service).
Download, enjoy and rate.
Comments
2 responses to “My First Android App”
If you do more Android Dev I really can’t recommend IntelliJ from Jetbrains highly enough.
It’s so much nicer than Eclipse – which is an abomination.
In fact after a few months of working with IntelliJ, even as a die hard VS fan I’ve actually come to the point where I wished that VS had some of the features of IntelliJ.
On the Android development side of things of being complex messy and quirky – I completely agree.
After 9 months of development I’m still hitting really weird quirks that you don’t know about and couldn’t be expected to hit until you run into it.
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