Best Practices in Android Development
Best practices are simply professional standards that are acceptable in a field. We will take a look at some standard practices we should apply when building Android applications. In this article, we will look at some best practices in Android development to help us build better apps.
The Android Platform Market Overview
The Android platform runs the mobile market right now. During the Google IO in May 2017, Google announced that there were 2 billion monthly active Android devices. This is about 74% of the mobile operating system market share according to StatCounter as at February 2018. This is one of the major reasons for the large emergence of Android developers in recent times. As a result of the large patronage of the mobile platform, the manner in which we build mobile solutions also matter a great deal. If you are building for billions of users, we have to grow above just building just for the functionalities. we have to consider other factors such as scalability, better user experience, etc.
Key Platform Statistics
| Metric | Data Point |
| Active Android Devices | 2 billion monthly active devices |
| Market Share | About 74% (as at February 2018) |
| Development Speed | Kotlin helps write code twice as faster as Java |
Development with Kotlin
Recently, there has been lots of promise in Android development since the formal introduction of Kotlin. In May 2017, still during the Google IO, Google announced its support for the language. Kotlin is a statically typed programming language that runs on the Java virtual machine. It is statically typed because the datatype of the variables is known at compile time. The language has been in development since 2010 and the current version at the time of writing this article is v1.2.30. Kotlin helps us to write code twice as faster as we would with Java. Android has even released a set of extension functions to make coding on Android even more concise.
The language comes with lots of new features:
- Null safety.
- Smart inference.
- Interoperability with Java.
- It can be compiled to JVM bytecode or JavaScript.
Design Patterns and Architecture
Design patterns are general, reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems within a given context in software design. It is more like a template towards a solution. Apart from just being a potential solution to a problem, it helps communication among developers. We will also make use of Kotlin for the snippets. Let’s jump into them right away!
Developer Resources and Documentation
To support your project, you can explore the following resources:
- Code Samples and Guides
- SDK Libraries and APIs
- Quickstarts and Knowledge Base
- Developer Center
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