My First Android App!
I have finally built and published an Android App!!
It went live yesterday. Unfortunately, it is nothing too exciting. It is simply a quadratic equation calculator. But I had to start somewhere and I learnt a lot in the process of building it.
I decided to support devices pre-4.0 and this is where most of my problems came:
- The action bar – an extremely useful built in menu bar that I had originally coded from scratch – is only available from, Android 3.0 on-wards. So I had to use a special support library to make it available for older phones. Problem was including this library in project was not that straightforward.
- The action bar still doesn’t behave as well as it does newer devices as the support library I used didn’t support everything.
- Getting a Context Action Bar to work on an older device was also a mission!
So most of my problems came from having to support older devices. In future apps, I don’t think I will do this. I will set the threshold as 4.0.
Today, just over a quarter of people still use devices less than 4.0, so I will lose this percentage of downloads. However, I will still cover 75% of all devices and this number can only get higher! It will also save a lot of headaches (at least for now until future versions come out!).
But to be honest, I doubt I will have much time for side projects from now until August when I finish University. This is why I was so keen to finish this app now and get it out there.
To find out more about the app including a link to the Play store, click here!