How It All Began - The Journey To Android App Development
Of late I have nothing special to write about, other than the fact that I am working on updates of my app. Other than that, I recently created a Jekyll + Material Design + Github Pages Blog (The one you’re seeing right now). Why I chose this? This is because of the less latency of GitHub pages, which is what I love the most. I had noticed considerable slow loading time on my Blogger blog, so I moved here. Anyway, I’m going out of topic, so let’s come back to it.
So in today’s blog post I’ll highlight how it all began – my passion for developing Android apps.
It all started in April 2016, when we were informed of the Summer internships going on in our college. I wasn’t actually interested in any of this, but on my mom’s insistence (well actually a forced one though), I decided to take up one of them. We had three options to choose from – Robotics, Open Source Contributions and Android App Development. I decided to take up Android App Development, because I believed that the Robotics Workshop will be back next year, and since I’m a part of the FOSS Club, I could skip out on the Contributions workshop too.
So, the workshop journey started in June 2016, wherein for the first three days we were taught Java, and then we started off with the actual stuff – programming in Android Studio. Compared to others, I was the one finishing the tasks in the CS With Android Course earlier. So this actually helped me build confidence. I had prior knowledge of developing Windows 10 Apps, not at a large scale, though enough for basic development, along with DirectX. So maybe, this thing helped me easily grasp everything.
After the workshop got over, we were given an assignment by my mentor, Mr. Chandramohan Sudar, aka Chandru Ettan (I’ll be calling him like this throughout this post, so sorry!) to develop an Android App. I started my work on the app, the day I reached home. I was building a simple Weather application which displayed nothing more than current temperature and a 10 day temperature view for a city. The UI was horrible, I decided to finish it off, and I sent that app to Chandru Ettan. This was in July 2016.
I paused this app’s development for 2 months as I had decided to focus on my academics and college related stuff. Then came September-October 2016. This is when I actually got time to focus more on my app than do anything else, because we had a leave of 23 days (minus 5, for the 5 weekdays that came in between these 23 days) and that gave me ample time to finish my app. By the time the vacation began, I had already finished off with the base implementation and I needed to focus more on the design work.
My efforts didn’t go in vain, as I believe that I had beautifully designed my app. What began from here (left), ended here (right)
Then after a few days I created a publisher’s account in Google Play Store as well. I published my app over there. I felt proud of my achievement. What started as an assignment work ended up being deployed in the Google Play Store. After a month, here’s how things stand (partly because I did not pay to promote my app, it was all organic) :
Here’s what I’ve done After I uploaded the app to the Play Store. Firstly, I confessed to Vipin sir (guru/mentor of our FOSS Club) that after uploading this app, my interest has deviated to Android, and being in the FOSS Club I wasn’t getting too many opportunities in developing this interest. So he advised me to call some of my other Android peers and mentor them to participate in worldwide competitions, and learn resources from the internet. So I did that, and now I’m mentoring folks who ask me for help in Android app development. I’ve also set the logo of our team, which is:
The next thing I’ve done is developing a custom ROM. Well, I didn’t actually create it on my own. I built it from the available CyanogenMod source already available for the Redmi Note 3. In future, I hope to create my own CyanogenMod ROMs.
I’m also targeting to participate in MCAP for the February 2018 edition.
Until another blog post, Ciao 😀
Aaditya
