With the spread of smartphones, smartphone technology improved exponentially and thus smartphones occupied a huge part of the market. To meet the requirement of the user and seeing the wide-open market there came different operating systems like Android, iOS, etc but for the sake of this article, we gonna talk specifically about how Android Development changed and what it looks like today. Today for making an Android App you don’t need to learn any programming language. Little strange, right!. Yes, but, indeed, you don’t need to learn programming language but you just need to have problem-solving skills. I know that learning programming language teaches that but when we say you don’t need programming language it means you don’t need to learn syntax and semantics and the process is too visual that it doesn’t feel like coding when in reality you are doing exactly “coding”. And Yes we will learn to create a simple Android App from this article itself, so enjoy reading!
How Modern Android App Development Looks Like
Blocky is the modern way of creating android apps. Instead of traditionally coding in an IDE in Blocky represent coding concepts in form of interlocking blocks
These interlocking blocks make it easier to visualize and help in capturing the flow of the program. Blocky is an open-source library that helps us in visualizing the blocks and using blocky there are several platforms that let us create android apps. MIT App Inventor is an open-source platform that let’s use blocky for creating the android app. In this modern way, developers develop the app in two sections:
- Designer: The designer creates the User Interface (UI) with several pre-existing components by drag and drop.
- Blocks: Blocks do all the logic work and are used to change several properties of components used in the designer.
Let’s Build a Simple Hello World App
Requirements
As blocky is a javascript library this helps us to create android apps directly from your web browser and thus you need:
- Browser
- Internet Connection
Note: Offline mode also exists.
Step by Step Implementation
Step 1: Go to MIT App Inventor’s creator and log in your using google account and click “start new project“
Step 2: Enter your project name and click “OK“
Step 3: Your empty project will look like this.
Step 4: Now drag and drop the “Button” and “Label” components from Palette.
Step 5: Click on the “Button” component which we dragged and then from right from “properties” change “Button Text” to “Click Me” similarly select “label” and change “label Text” to an empty string.
Note: Label disappears because we changed its text to an empty string.
Step 6: That is enough for the Designer view now to switch to “Block” from the top right corner. Click on a component to access respective blocks and drag and drop the required one.
We will use simple logic. When the user clicks on the button app must change the label text to “Hello World!”
Our app is ready now we just need to export in. From the menu click “Build” and select whether you want to apk to be downloaded to the computer or generate a downloadable QR code with a link. Now simply install it on your device.
Output:
Conclusion
Modern Android app development is a very fast and efficient way of developing apps without learning any language. However, it isn’t the complete replacement of native development and code. It is great for the time you need visualization and also good for introducing kids to how the program works and can be really useful for them to build their own logic and algorithms and see them working in reality.