Android Application Development For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Software Tools

Various Android tools are at your disposal while you’re writing Android applications. The following sections outline some of the most popular tools to use in your day-to-day Android development process.

Internet

Thanks to the Internet capabilities of Android devices, users can find real-time information on the Internet, such as the next showing of a new movie or the next arrival of a commuter train. As a developer, you can have your apps use the Internet to access real-time, up-to-date data, such as weather, news, and sports scores, or (like Pandora and YouTube) to store your application’s icons and graphics.

You can even offload your application’s more intense processes to a web server whenever appropriate, to save processing time or to streamline the app. In this well-established software architecture, known as client–server computing, the client uses the Internet to make a request to a server that’s ready to perform some work for your app. The built-in Maps app is an example of a client that accesses map and GPS data from a web server.

Audio and video support

Including audio and video in your apps is a breeze in the Android operating system. Many standard audio and video formats are supported, and adding multimedia content to your apps — such as sound effects, instructional videos, background music, and streaming video and audio from the Internet — couldn’t be ...