Android is an open source, Linux-based mobile operating system. Android was developed by the Open Handset Alliance, which was lead by Google and featured contributions from many other companies.

Today Android has become the leading Operating System being used in various devices, like mobile phone, tablets, watches, TV, cars and many more. It powers more than a billion devices all over the globe. Android has been the best selling OS on tablets since 2013, and on smartphones it is dominant by any metric.

Prerequisites

For getting started with Android development, you should already know about a few things:

  • Java: Android development is mostly done in Java. It’s not a difficult language to learn, but knowing how it applies to Android development can be confusing without a firm foundation in the language. Android Java is not exactly standard Java, but learning standard Java will make it much easier for you to pick up Android development.
  • XML: Knowing XML can be useful in a number of tech-related fields and Android is no exception. In particular, XML files make it easier to declare UI elements in the apps you create. Past experience is a big plus.
  • Perseverance: Lastly, learning the ins and outs of the Android development toolkit is going to take time. Learning how to create a quality app is going to take even more time. Don’t rush. Keep at it and focus your mind on the long term. If you don’t, you’ll be frustrated and want to give up.

Tools

The things you’ll need to start building applications for Android are:

Kotlin language support

Starting with Android Studio 3.0, tooling support for Kotlin is bundled directly into Android Studio. Kotlin is a statically-typed programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine and also can be compiled to JavaScript source code.

Kotlin is designed to interoperate with Java code and is reliant on Java code from the existing Java Class Library, such as the collections framework. It was designed to be a better object-oriented language than Java, but still be backwards compatible with Java and allow companies to migrate gradually.

Some of the benefits of using Kotlin for Android development include:

  • Kotlin requires less boilerplate code.
  • Kotlin is a type-safe language .
  • Kotlin is more expressive than Java.

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