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JA3. Future of Android Development

Considering that Android has a great market share over other mobile platforms. Reflecting upon the reading assignments, discuss the pros and cons of becoming an android developer from a career point of view. Include current trends and challenges in android development.

Answer

Android runs on 75% of smartphones on the world that represents 2.5 billion devices (Tabor & Vrdoljak, 2019, chapter 3). With the advances in hardware that runs Android this number is only growing which makes building and Android App a vital part in bushiness’s story.

The growing number of devices only increases the need for Android developers. The adoption of modern languages like kotlin, which uses the most out of the Android OS, while allowing teams to focus on business logic by hiding complex code under Kotlin’s standard library abstraction. Some big players already adopted Kotlin such as Uber, Evernote, Pinterest, and Google (AndroidDeveloper, n.d.).

Android also runs on ever-increasing number of devices other than phones; this includes devices like television sets, watches, tablets …etx. Modern tools and languages allow for developing those applications using the same tools fro building Android applications.

Fits every purpose of life, as there will be an app dedicated for improving what ever purpose you have in life; from health care, to help people with special needs up to organizing tourism and money management applications.

The Open source nature of the entire Android project makes working with third party libraries much easier as well as with the system itself; patching or tweaking a library to your need never made easier with you having access to the source code of such libraries.

The improving set of development tools that are represented by the powerful Android Studio and other tools that makes developing for Android -or even cross-platform- a fun experience.

The landscape is not all rosy, there are lots of applications already on play store which makes the mission of new apps much harder to stand out and get enough users to make new apps profitable.

The competitive market may increase stress levels and put extra pressure on the developer. The learning curve for Android development is a bit steeper than other technologies (like Web Development) which may be a barrier to get in.

The fragmentation of Android versions available in the market also present a challenge to the developer as it requires constant analysis of most used versions among app users and then adapt accordingly. This adaptation my govern the timing of using certain OS features if large percentage of the app users does not have the right Android version.

Overall, Becoming an Android Developer is now of the best jobs in terms of pay and career opportunities. and despite the challenges listed above, which require the developer to put extra care while dealing with them, the Android developer -in my opinion- is only getting more demand and better future ahead.

References