Saturday, May 9, 2015

Expansion of Android Landscape Increasing App Developers’ Pain Part 4

Android Development Tools to Ease Life

Previously in part 1 and par 2, we have analyzed acute fragmentation issues on Android OS and in part 3, we tried to get ideas of some concurrent solution existing in the present market. Now, in this recent post I would like to cite some third-party tools, which are capable to change the entire game of Android development and ease the pains of developers at greater extent.


Third-Party Android Tools – Game Changer

With the pace of time, Android being an open and malleable platform, have established a rich ecosystem of 3rd party developers and accumulate treasure of various tools. These vast contributions have gradually changed the ways of how Android application designers, Android application programmers, and Android application testers work and accomplish their challenges with desired success. Let’s check which tools, frameworks, technologies, and services have left or leaving great impacts on the Android app developer community by-and-large. 


Emulator – Genymotion
No doubt, Android SDK carries out-of-box emulators, but Genymotion is faster than those in-built tools so it is getting momentum among the Android community.


Hybrid Extensions and Plug-ins
If you opt for robust functionality, out-of-box features, and excellent user experiences accumulation of various plug-ins are essential such as social sharing plug-ins, cloud integration, email composers, native page transitions, and many AWS like web services.


Chromium WebView
Web components are essential part of mobile app development and for Android platform Google has introduced Chrome V8 JavaScript engine with the release of android KitKat updates. These web components are available for developers in form of WebView. Thus, taking help through WebView may offer modern web standard support to the Android developers in their app development. 


HTML Application Runtime – Crosswalk
We know WebView now and its ultimate benefits for obtaining web services in Android applications. However, by nature web components need constant updates and providing them runtime engine is essential to avoid manual updates of WebView frequently. Crosswalk is giving HTML based application runtime services.

Thus, Android developers can leverage the emerging web and mobile technologies such as:

  • WebGL
  • WebRTC
  • W3C’s SysApps Working Group APIs
  • JavaScript Extension Framework, along with affording access to Apache Cordova APIs



Therefore, the portable Crosswalk runtime engine for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript based applications eliminates constant updates of Android WebView and ease the life of programmers at greater extent.


Android Studio
Google has freed Android developers form Eclipse and ADT plug-in combo by unveiling Android Studio. In Android Studio, you will find Gradle-based build system, code template to create common app features without ditching things from the scratch, editor with Intellisense, abilities to utilize imported classes, etc. These are something that modern Android developers love in the latest IDE and fortunately, Android Studio pass their tests for selection of IDE in Android app development.


In short, aforementioned tools have eased the work and life of an average Android application developer and of entire Android developer community by-and-large. If you opt for any advance level Android app designing as well as Android app programming work, you need to have updated team of hire Android application developers and an established Android development company with the latest infrastructure as well as trained human resources like Lujayn to win the battle. 


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