Android, the worlds most popular mobile operating system just ! 🎉 turned 8 years old This amazing platform has come such a long way since 1.0, and to celebrate this milestone I came up with 8 reasons I love developing for the Android platform. I’m keen to hear yours too! 1. Intents Android’s system is amazing. It’s a core feature of the OS that was designed extremely well. Intent Intents allow an app to broadcast its to perform an action, and app to respond. intent any This opens up so many possibilities for integration between apps, or with the system. Intents are the building blocks allowing system apps to be replaced with 3rd party apps. Android is well known for its abilities to customised, and we have Intents to thank for that! 2. The Resource system Android’s is amazing. There have been surprisingly few changes or updates to the way resources work since Android was released. It goes to show the incredible design and forethought that went into the initial design of Android. resource system Resources are the central way of defining themes, styles, strings, drawables, layouts and more in your application. The beauty of this system is that it supports the ability to provide a different set of resources for a different configuration. configuration qualifiers — A configuration can be anything from the devices language, orientation, screen size, API level and more. Localization is incredibly easy. Providing different layouts for large screen sizes is a cinch. Defining multiple themes that change the entire look of your application — built right in! If you are not using the resource system to its full potential, . you should be 3. Notifications API The is amazing. When Android Wear, Android TV, and Android Auto were announced, I expected a whole new set of API’s to enable features such as home screen recommendations for Android TV, cards for Android Wear, Android Auto interactions or Android N’s quick reply. notifications API Nope. The answer? Notifications. Notifications are used for all of the above. The flexibility of the notifications API is never ending. Coupled with the Intent system they become even more powerful. You’ll learn to love this API. 4. Google Play Services is amazing. It’s a bundle of cool, interesting and useful API’s installed as an APK on every (Google certified) device. Google Play Services The ability to update these API’s outside of Android normal system updates is a huge win for Google and helps to solve some of Androids fragmentation woes. Updates are released every six weeks so there is always something new to look forward to! Some of the API’s included in Play Services are: — a more accurate and battery efficient Location API Fused Location Provider — an API for enabling features based on proximity Nearby API Google Maps And much more! Be careful though! Adding the entire Google Play Services dependency can quickly put your app over the 64K dex limit. Only compile the modules you need! And as a bonus, Magnus Hyttsten’s videos are hilarious! Whats new in Google Play Services 5. Android Studio is amazing! Who remembers the eclipse days? I’ve tried to block it out. 😢 Android Studio Android Studio is the official IDE for Android, based on IntelliJ Community Edition. This IDE will be your life — learn to use it! There are infinite keyboard shortcuts, refactoring’s, features and integrations that can save you hours of development time. The pace of development of Android Studio is fast, and alpha and beta builds are available if you are game enough! Promising features like show that Google are committed to developers and making it easier to build great apps. Instant Run 6. Google Play Store The Google Play Store and the Developer Console are amazing. I love that I can release a new application to millions of Android devices all over the world within a few hours. The automated review process means much less overhead in the development cycle. Bug fixes and updates can be rolled out extremely quickly. The Play Store also has a number of other great features: Store listing experiments — A/B testing for your Play Store listing page Alpha and beta testing An API! — automate your Play Store uploads — manage your apps on the go A native app The Google Play Store provides a great way to distribute your app. Pay attention to the , though! guidelines 7. The community The Android community is amazing. Open source fosters open source. You’d be hard-pressed to find an app that doesn’t use one of Jake Wharton’s or Square’s open source libraries. It’s commonplace for large companies like Trello and AirBnb to open source the tools they use internally. Use the community to your advantage! Libraries like OkHttp and Retrofit, Glide and RxJava can get your next app up and running in no time. Services like and are free, and essential to creating high quality apps. Crashlytics Google Analytics Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to! 8. Material Design is amazing! Seriously! Material design Material design is perhaps one of the biggest improvements to date since Android 1.0. It’s a new, very well thought out design language based around amazing animations, transitions, and the metaphor of ‘paper’. The community adoption and support of Material Design has been huge, with sites like quickly springing up, encouraging developers to push the boundaries of this incredible design language. Material Up Material Design extends far beyond Android too, with Google applying this across their entire product line, the web, and even iOS. The implementation can be tricky though. Shared Element transitions are fiddly and hard to get right, and some components of Material Design aren’t yet present in the design library, like . bottom navigation Android is amazing On top of all of these points, Android has almost is available on thousands of devices, is present on flagships as well entry level devices in emerging markets. 70% market share , I’m so proud to be an Android Developer, and I love the potential reach I have with this platform. Android apps can run on everything from phones to watches to cars to TV’s. Tell me thats not exciting! Be together, not the same That slogan quite aptly sums up Android. An open platform designed for everyone! Happy 8th Birthday Android! If you liked this article make sure to give it a few 👏’s, and follow me . on twitter

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