Fast Tracking Android App Development With Optimum Delivery

Most Android developers nowadays are faced with challenges of delivering optimum features or products in due time. Most developers believe working hard will ensure their success in achieving such actionable results, however, working smart is the means to getting this done.

Working smart brings productivity, while working too hard might result in frustration.

In this article, we will be looking at some basic tips to working smart as an Android developer in order to:

• Clean up your next development
• Increase the quality of your next mobile app
• Get familiarized with open source
• Know the leadership and forces in Android community

Android Development Tips to WorkingSmart

1. Break down the processes via computational thinking
2. Choose a design pattern (MVC, MVP, MVVM)
3. Use open source libraries
4. Share your problems and solutions
5. Stay updated
6. Engage your belief in solving problems

Computational Thinking

This is a process of thinking through the App development processes while bearing in mind the following points:

• Decomposition: breaking down of data, processes, and problems into smaller manageable parts
• Pattern Recognition: observing patterns, trends, and regularities in data
• Abstraction: identifying the general principles that generate these patterns
• Algorithm: developing the step-by-step instructions for solving the problem

For more in-depth knowledge, you can read up via the Computational Thinking Course.

Design Patterns/Architecture

This will eventually save you time during the course of development by sticking to a certain pattern while writing your code. You can easily choose between Model-View-Controller (MVC), Model-View-Presenter (MVP), or Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM). If you aren’t familiar with these, take a few minutes to study this architecture from google samples on Github.

Use Open Source Libraries (Github)

• Network libraries such as:

1. OkHttp
2. Volley
3. Retrofit

• Image libraries such as:

1. Picasso
2. Glide

• Dependency injection such as:

1. ButterKnife
2. Android Annotations
3. Dagger (2)

• Video streaming:

1. Libstreaming

• UI libraries such as:

1. PageIndicator

2. FanLayoutManager

3. DiagonalLayout

4. Ticker

5. AndroidImageCropper

• Data pub/sub library and Reactive Programming

1. RxJava & RxAndroid
2. EventBus

Share Your Problems and Solutions

Sharing problems is one of the instant ways of forging ahead while coding. A problem shared is a problem solved.

• Use platforms such as Stackoverflow.com to share your problems, and don’t forget to also share back on how the problem was solved.
• Join an online community for collaboration, learning, and sharing. This will keep you apprised of the latest, most efficient, and best way of doing things from like minds. Ever wondering which of the online communities to join? Below are some recommendations:

1. Android chat via androidchat.co
2. Dev Community via Square on Slack
3. Stack Overflow
4. Android Community
5. Quora

Stay Updated

• Follow experts

Follow experts in the Android community.You can get a comprehensive curated list of Android developer experts to follow via TechBeaconr. And of course, you can follow me: Adetuyi Tolu Emmanuel @adetuyitolu.

• Read tech news and Android blog posts
• Attend events and meet-ups

You can always search for interesting meet-ups using the following:

• Meetup.com
• Attending.io
• Eventbrite.com

Your Belief

This is the strongest of all highlighted points. Your belief reflects solemnly on the why part of your day-to-day activities; the reason why you chose to be an Android developer, the reason why you wanted to solve a problem via coding, the strong belief that you have in yourself. This will always go a long way to bring life to any project or feature at hand.

This post was originally published by the author on Medium. This version has been edited for clarity and may appear different from the original post.