What Should A Developer Know Before Building Cellphone Apps?

I want to start making cellphone apps with Android as first choice but not the only one. I have 10 years of experience with Java, C#, C++ in commercial applications and I know that

Solution 1:

Just start with Android Developer site http://developer.android.com/index.html. It contains all you need for the beginning. Also take a look onto Commonsware android books, those are really great both for beginners and experienced programmers - http://commonsware.com/books.html.

Solution 2:

You could start with two great books listed as reference [1] (Ableson F. et al., Unlocking Android, 2009. Manning Publications Co., ISBN 978-1-933988-67-2) and [4] (Conder S. and Darcey L., Android Wireless Application Development, 2009. Addison-Wesley, ISBN 978-0-321-62709-4) in my degree thesis. Both have an extensive walk-through of Android, which you as a developer should know. You'll get all you need from "Hello World" to deploy an actual application in the Android Market.

Android is the place to start, since you already know Java and C# and C++. You can even use native classes in Java written in C or C++ if you have some useful standard classes in your library. More on Natives you'll find in the reference book [9] (Silva V., Pro Android Games, 2009. Apress, ISBN 978-1-4302-2647-5).

The best of luck!

Solution 3:

Only support the TOP os's which generate income. So at this moment IOS and Android. Don't go down the path of Symbian and Java... it's dirty, and you won't like what you see down there.

Solution 4:

What really got me going was the Hello, Views documentation. Will really get you up and running instantly.

Solution 5:

I recently decided studying Android, and http://developer.android.com was a great resource. You should read the Application fundamentals doc first and User Interface documentations later.

There are some tutorials too.

I read the whole Application fundamentals, and that gave me a good idea of "how to program for Android" since it has its own architecture and environment. Get the idea of Activities, Services, Broadcast Receivers and Content Providers and try to adapt yourself to that structure. Then read about how Tasks work, and later go into UI.

As a subjective opinion, being Android so popular and growing, I don't think it's worth the effort to study Java ME or even C (I'd go for iPhone devel in any case with Objective-C). Android will probably give you more money and faster. Java FX might be interesting...