by Sofia Coppol, Negosentro.com |
If you know the fundamentals of Android development, your application will hardly fail. This article is an effort to inform Android developers with some of the most important fundamentals of Android Application development. Learn these fundamental and make your Android app project successful.
It takes too many efforts to successfully implement an Android application development project which will really excite users. With hundreds of types of Android-powered phones, tablets, phablets, convertible and handhelds devices, Android developers need to optimize an app for a laundry-list of things. And here are the most important of them.
- Visual design
Visual design is the first thing noticed by users. If it does not appeal them, the app will most likely to fail. Many developers have good experience in user interface, but not all of them are expert in visual designing. The best idea is you get the visual designs developed from experts. Expert visual designers aren’t merely graphics designers or UI / UX designers but they are the problem solvers in the world of design. They are the experts who bring design into life and pass on the same to an app. Consider them the key role-players who design what has to go into particular app’s appearance. Apart from creating beautiful designs, visual designers interactively explain the concept behind an application.
- Scale Intelligently
In software development, scalability is applied at various places such as a system, network and growing amount of work. An Android app development too needs scaling. While applying scalability, you must remember that Android is the platform of many screen densities. Scale it as a web responsive design so that the app can show up across all Android powered devices.
- Use default or any fonts
Android supports two types of fonts: Droid and Roboto. But you can add any font with TTF format to your app. All you need to do is look for examples and reference and do it creatively. You have also to fine-tune the fonts with visuals so that they both look part of each other. The more you try to align fonts with the visuals, the more you attain perfection.
- 9-patch Drawables
9-patches are considered necessary for building and customizing UI widgets.They let PNGs be stretched and scaled nicely in pre-defined ways.
- Handle Android-versions with care
Google keeps announcing new version of the Android every year. But how many devices can be upgraded to a new Android OS. The fact is that all devices will not be upgraded to a new OS because they were also not upgraded to previous versions. Some device manufacturers have poor reputation for upgrading their devices to new versions. This is why you have to provide support from the least utilized Android OS version to the latest one.
This of course annoys developers. But they have two options. Deliver the same look and feel for all Android versions, or use separate sets of widgets and drawables for separate versions.
- Stick to fundamentals
Many Android developers think that sticking to fundamentals of UI design will end-up with an indistinctive app. However they are wrong. You will probably not like to see users to spend more time in understanding the app because it is based on a completely different style of navigation. Mobile apps are not supposed to be based on a complex style of navigation. Mobiles are easy devices, and their apps should be easy too. Often time users only use single hand and a thumb to operate their mobiles and here, various elements of an app need to be arranged in the access of that thumb.
- Is the final product polished enough?
If graphics do not have details, they will not attract users. Ensure that graphics have enough details that make the Android version of the app as original as iOS and others. Try to create graphics in such a way that it looks a part of OS itself. Graphics of the app needs to be balanced and blended with the UI and UX of the application.
- Porting mostly delivers poor user experience.
Your Android app needs to live up to the expectations of users as iOS apps do. But it will hardly satisfy them if you directly port an iOS version to Android platform. It would deliver a poor experience. Different operating systems are approached in different manner by different group of audience. Simply porting an Android app to iOS or vice versa does never work.
An Android application development finished-up with considering these fundamental will have more chances of success. These fundamentals do not guarantee any sort of success but because they are fundamentals, they assure an Android development team to take their app closer to success.
Author Bio
Sofia is a digital marketing expert in Rapidsoft Technologies, a prominent mobile app development company which provides iOS and android app development services across the global. She loves to write on latest mobile trends, mobile technologies, startups and enterprises.
