Introduction to Android

Android was launched by Google in 2007, two years after it acquired the technology, as part of industrywide effort to establish a new mobile phone platform that was nonproprietary and open, unlike the technology that drives RIM BlackBerry and Apple iPhone. Some of the biggest names in mobile phones and technology—Google, Intel, Motorola, Nvidia, Samsung, and other companies—formed the Open Handset Alliance to promote the new platform for mutual benefit.

Google released the Android Software Development Kit (SDK), a free set of tools for developing Android apps. The first phone running Android, the T-Mobile G1, came out in June 2008.

This effort started slowly, but since early 2010 it has exploded and become a genuine rival to iPhone and other mobile platforms. All major phone carriers now offer Android phones. There’s also a growing market for tablet and e-book readers.

Before Android, mobile application development required expensive programming tools and developer programs. The makers of the phone had control over who’d be allowed to create apps for them and whether the apps could be sold to users.

Android tears down that wall.

The open-source and non-proprietary nature of Android means that anyone can develop, release, and sell apps. The only cost involved is a nominal fee to submit apps to Google’s marketplace. Everything else is free.

The place to download the Android SDK and find out more about creating programs for the platform is the Android Developer site at http://developer.android.com. You will consult it often as you write your own apps because it documents every class in Android’s Java class library and serves as an extensive online reference.

Writing Android apps is easier if you’re using an integrated development environment (IDE) that’s equipped to support the Android SDK. The most popular IDE for Android programming is Eclipse, which also is free and open source. An Android Plug-in for Eclipse makes the SDK function seamlessly inside the IDE.

You can use Eclipse to write Android apps, test them in an emulator that acts like an Android phone and even deploy them on an actual device.

For most of its existence, the Java language has been used to write programs that run in one of three places: a desktop computer, a web server, or a web browser.

Android puts Java everywhere. Your programs can be deployed on millions of phones and other mobile devices.

This fulfills the original design goal of Java back when James Gosling invented the language while working at Sun Microsystems in the mid 1990s. Sun wanted a language that could run everywhere on devices such as phones, smart cards, and appliances.

Java’s developers set aside those dreams when the language became popular first as a means of running interactive web programs and then as a general-purpose language.

Fifteen years later, the Android platform is hosting as many as a billion Java programs around the world, according to one industry estimate.

Android has the potential to be the most pervasive—and lucrative—area of Java programming for years to come.

It may also be the most fun.