Android guide

This guide is designed to help you get started on Android and introduce you to some intermediate topics.

• Getting started

• Staying informed

• Intermediate topics

Getting started

Assuming you already have some coding experience, Google’s official Developing Android Apps udacity course comes highly recommended by our team. After completing your first few lessons, you can try to working on our code base, continuing the course as necessary.

Once you have a little experience, the beginner’s guides in the official Android developer docs teach popular topics pretty well and are a good reference. However, they aren’t very good at telling you where to go next (which is why we recommended the course). Note: the documentation on less popular topics are often missing information.

There are also many good Android tips and conference talks on YouTube.

You may wish to see our guide for properly configuring Java to properly set up command line tools.

Staying informed

If you like staying up-to-date on the latest Android topics, members of our team recommend:

• Reading blogs

  • Official Android developer blog (also has a newsletter)

• Subscribing to weekly newsletters

  • Android weekly

  • Jetpack Compose Newsletter by Commonsware

• Listening to podcasts

  • Fragmented

  • Android Developers Backstage

• Visiting conferences (or watching their recordings)

  • Google IO

  • Android Developer Summit

  • Droidcon

• Visiting local meetups

Intermediate topics

Comfortable with the basics? Here are a few of our favorite resources to get started on intermediate topics.

• Android style tips (circa 2014)

• Our Accessibility guide

• WorkManager FAQ

Navigating the Android source code

Oftentimes, it’s easier to solve a problem when you understand how your code is interacting with the Android framework: you can do this by reading the Android source code! You can do plain-text searches on the Android source code at http://androidxref.com/ (choosing the latest API level and searching in the “frameworks” is usually sufficient).

You can also navigate the Android source code in Android Studio, after downloading the sources:

• Click a framework method and use “go to definition”

• Step into framework methods via the debugger

• Set breakpoints in framework files to stop whenever the framework calls that method