Android Developers Blog

Luli Perkins , Developer Relations Program Manager Our second edition of #AndroidDevJourney is here! At the beginning of this year we launched the #AndroidDevJourney to share the stories of members of our community through our social platforms. Each Saturday, from January through June, we’ll feature a new developer on our Twitter account . For a chance to be featured in our March spotlight series, tweet us your story using #AndroidDevJourney. Andrew Kelly Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started. In 2012 I was working as a contractor for the NSW government here in Australia as a Java J2EE web developer. I'd been in that role for 11 years, building web apps for students and teachers. However, in 2012 the government decided that contractors were expensive and let us all go. So while in my hand-over period I'd read about some kids who were writing Android apps and making lots of money doing so. The Android Market was new and so any ap...

Posted by Luli Perkins , Developer Relations Program Manager We kicked off the #AndroidDevJourney to give members of our community the opportunity to share their stories through our social platforms. Each Saturday from January through June we’ll feature a new developer on our Twitter account . We have received an overwhelming number of inspirational stories and hope you enjoy reading through the ones we’ve selected below. For a chance to be featured in our February spotlight series, tweet us your story using #AndroidDevJourney. Niharika Arora Tell me about your journey in becoming an Android Developer and how you got started. My journey started in the field of Android when I was in my 4th year of undergrad studies. I got an internship in a startup named GreenAppleSolutions. There I got a chance to work on an Android project from scratch and luckily my first project went live on the Play Store. During this whole internship, I found Android so interesting because everything you code,...

The Google Home app helps set up, manage, and control your Google Home, Google Nest, and Chromecast devices—plus thousands of connected home products like lights, cameras, thermostats, and more. The engineering team behind the Google Home app benefits from using Kotlin and Android Jetpack libraries to boost engineering productivity and developer happiness. What they did: The Google Home team decided to incorporate Kotlin into their codebase to make programming more productive and to enable the usage of modern language features like var/val, smart casts, coroutines, and more. As of June 2020, about 30% of the code base is written in Kotlin , and Kotlin development is encouraged for all new features. The team also adopted Jetpack libraries to improve developer velocity, decrease the need for boilerplate code maintenance, and reduce the necessary amount of code. Jetpack libraries also helped make their code more testable, since there are clearer functional boundaries and APIs. Results:...