Android is the world’s most popular mobile OS in the mobile market. From phones and watches to cars and TVs, customise your digital life with Android. Many companies preferred Android to begin mobile application development, or entering to the mobile development market because it has a lower cost barrier than iOS. 

Android is an open source software stack for a wide range of mobile devices and a corresponding open source project led by Google. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository offer the information and source code you need to create custom variants of the Android stack, port devices and accessories to the Android platform, and ensure your devices meet compatibility requirements.

Now, it’s time to find and hire a developer to turn your creative and amazing ideas into a tangible app. Here’s a look at what Android developers do so you’re prepared to hire the best one for your Android project.

What Does An Android Developer Do?

An Android Developer designs and builds advanced applications for the Android platform and has a solid understanding of the full mobile development life-cycle. Through their creations they give the companies they work for the best opportunity to reach users and make an impact worldwide.

An Android developer is in charge of developing applications for devices powered by the Android operating system. They have a strong understanding of the patterns and practices that revolve around such platform. Moreover, they ensure the best possible performance, quality, and responsiveness of the application.

An Android developer takes project specifications and turns them into a tangible application that can be submitted and published in the Google Play store. Most mobile app projects have a design phase, a development phase, and a submission process. Many Android app developers are “full stack,” handling both design, UI and app coding, but you may choose to have both a designer and a programmer on your app’s development team. Just note that UX (user experience) and UI (user interface) design are two different skill sets that are important for the success of your project. If you decide to hire separate contractors for each component, you need one for UX and one for UI.

Android developer skills are separated into three levels depending on their experience. Developers start at the junior phase for the first few years, although the number of apps they’ve developed and the apps’ complexity are far more important when you determine the right developer for your project. After working alongside more experienced developers, they move to the intermediate phase where they can work on more projects independently. After several years working with complex Android applications, a developer is considered senior level. A senior developer can not only code a project, but they can also make decisions about how to design products. All Android developers should be familiar with:

• Android Studio
• Android Material Design Guidelines
• Java and the Android SDK
• The Emulator
• Publishing to the Google Play Store

The developer you need will be determined by your project requirements. If you’re creating a new app from scratch, you’ll need a senior-level developer with the experience to take the project from the beginning and see it through to completion. Junior and intermediate level developers are beneficial for small changes, but a senior developer should review the code before it’s put into production.

How To Define Your Android Project

To find the right freelance developer, you need to write the project with as much detail and documentation as possible. This could be better for developer to choose the right track to start the work. Android Studio makes it easy to create Android apps for various form factors, such as handsets, tablets, TV, and Wear devices. 

This article shows you how to start a new Android app project or import an existing project with your developer. Two major things to learn before start to work on the project. 

1. Are you creating an app from scratch?
2. Do you have an existing app that needs some bugs fixed?

Define your criteria. What kind of freelance developer you need (Junior or Senior) This enables you to describe the tasks to be done with runtime alerts and notification using the Toogit Project Management Tool, this gives you some direction on development level.

Next, Evaluate what type of challenges freelance android developer may face. This evaluation is most important to write the timeline for your project.

Toogit have more experienced android developers. They should guide and develop your project with a professional way. Always remember that more experienced Freelance Android developers on Toogit may charge more even for simple requirements. If you don’t have any understanding of the development process, it might be better to stick with a senior-level developer. A senior-level developer can help guide you through the process.

If you have a smaller budget and simple bug fixes or additions, you can specify that you need a junior-level or intermediate-level developer, but remember that they may not have the skill set to see a larger project through to completion.

The final aspect of your project to mention is its duration (time and cost) it will take to complete. Android development projects can take a week, a month, six months, or more. The duration is often determined by the developer based on your project description, but you can at least provide an estimate or a deadline, if applicable.

Once you get an estimate of how long the project will take, work with your developer to break down the project into releases if you have a flat-rate cost estimate. You can break the project into phases and ask for specific deliverables by particular deadlines.

Example phases include the following deliverables:

• Wireframes
• Android UI design
• Software architecting
• Front-end coding
• Back-end integration
• Testing
• Publishing

Your Android Application Project Description Writing Guide

How you can write a brief and attractive Android Mobile Application Job description and post it for free? This guide will help you. The way you write a description will determine the quality of developer that you’ll attract. It’s important to write a detailed desciription of job which helps to build the top android the developer interaction in your project and they submit proposals with fairly accurate cost and time estimates on Toogit.

The title of your project description can include the type of development that you need. You know that you need an Freelance Android developer, but do you need a designer and a programmer? Do you need someone who understands a specific framework and the latest versions of android? The title should pull best Freelance Android developers with a specific skill set.

Next, What type of application do you want developed (gaming, educational, entertainment, etc.)? If you have documentation / excel / slides / pdfs or referrence URLs that shows basic wireframes or ideas, you can include these in your project description. Describe the project in simple and straight way with key points & modules it gives a developer a good sense of the work to be done. If you need the developer to sign an agreement, you can also specify this requirement in your description.

Part of your description should also define the deliverables including any designs, APIs, and full source code that can be uploaded to the Google Play Store. The source code is usually delivered using a version control solution such as Git, and then it can be uploaded to Google Play. You might not know the skill set level that you need, but being descriptive will help providers determine if they have the right experience for your project.

Sample

Below is a sample of how a project description may appear. 

Project Title: 

Android Developer for Online Hotel Booking App

Description:

We are looking for an Android developer to design and program a hote booking app. We have ideas and documentation included in this job post, but we require a developer, designer to paint the design into a workable hotel booking app. 

The perfect developer will provide us with the .apk that we can upload to Google Play (Store). All source code, assets, databases, and design will be transferred after the project is complete. We expect the project to be divided into phases/releases where the first phase includes design and assets. The 2nd phase is the development (coding), and the final phase is testing.

The estimated duration of this project is six months. We need the completed hotel booking app by <your target date>

Nowadays, Android is not just on tens of thousands of different phones and tablets. It’s on your wrist, in your living room, in your car, and as soon we start assigning IP addresses to inanimate objects, it is going to be pretty much everywhere around us. A lot of ground for even an experienced Android developer to cover!

Also there are over one million apps on Google Play, not counting Amazon AppStore or markets we are not generally interested in.

So, how can an independent developer create a successful app in this huge market with big players? I have no idea, I haven’t made a successful app! But, I have made a cute one, and I’d like to share my story with you.

Few Android Studio Tips, Tricks & Resources you should be familiar with, as an Android Developer

The reason of this article, is to list helpful tips, tricks, shortcuts and resources for Android Studio that will improve your overall efficiency and performance.

1.Material Colors theme for Android Logcat

To change Android Studio Logcat you need to go to:Preferences (Settings on Windows / Linux machines) → Editor → Colors & Fonts → Android Logcat and change the foreground color for every type of log.

2. Prevent Android Studio Logcat from clearing the log for the current application when it crashes. 

To do that you need to go to theAndroid Monitorpanel and chooseEdit filter configurationon the right side dropdown.

3. Apply a proper code style to your IDE (IntelliJ / Android Studio). 

Go toPreferences → Code Style → Javaand in aSchemedropdown you can choose your code style (or set up a new one).

2 styles which are especially worth to mention:

Square Java Code Styles with Android

Google Java Code Style.

4. Use split screen for increasing efficiency.

To turn this feature on, you need to right mouse click on the tab of your main screen and choose Split Vertically / Horizontally feature.

But to be as efficient as possible we need to set up a custom keyboard’s shortcut. To do that go to Preferences → Keymap and search for Split Vertically. Then open a context menu and click Add Keyboard Shortcut. 

It is shown on a gif below. You can define the shortcut for a horizontal split view as well.

5. Distraction Free Mode. 

You can enable it by going to: View → Enter Distraction Free Mode

6. Use Live Templates

you can use many already defined templates, like for Toasts or if conditions.

you can use your own custom templates. Here is a great reference article by Reto Meier. You can also refer to the IntelliJ IDEA documentation.

Learn XML And Java

Extensible markup language (XML) is a markup language that’s the foundation for the Android user interface (UI) and elements. Java is the back-end coding language of the Android platform, and it’s used with binding functionality with your XML layouts. Let’s take a look at a small example.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <layout xmlns:android=http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"> <data> <variable name="user" type="com.example.User"/> </data> <LinearLayout android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="match_parent"> <TextView android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="@{user.firstName}"/> <TextView android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="@{user.lastName}"/> </LinearLayout> </layout>

This small layout has one data object defined as “User.” For developers used to binding elements in even web design, this should be intuitive for you. The data element is defined in Java, and then the object data is bound to the front-end layout element. In this example, we have a first and last name. The following Java code is an example of a User class used for the binding.

public class User { public final String firstName; public final String lastName; public User (String firstName, String lastName){ this.firstName = firstName; this.lastName = lastName; } }

Notice that the constructor takes a first and last name variable and binds the data to the public class properties. When the screen opens on the device, this data is then bound to the front-end elements.

Before you get started in Android Application development, you should be expert in both of these technologies. Understanding the fundamentals of XML formats is relatively easy, but Java is an object-oriented language and object-oriented programming (OOP) can be challenging if you’re not familiar with the concept. A newer language and framework, Kotlin, has been introduced to help advance Android app development. It can also be used with legacy Java apps as Kotlin co-operates with Java code.

The best way to learn Java is to dive into someone else’s code. GitHub is filled with open-source projects that help you understand Java and OOP concepts. The better your OOP skills are, the easier it will be to create a better coded, less buggy Android app.

Understand Memory Limitations

Mobile devices don’t have the high memory limitations that desktops have. In mobile programming, you must learn to code with smaller memory limitations in mind. If you carelessly use memory on an Android device, you run the risk of your app crashing due to “out of memory” errors.

To work around this, use services on the device sparingly and release memory resources when your app is hidden. You can release memory resources by overriding the onTrimMemory event although you should know that this isn’t a magic solution that allows you to ignore other performance optimization throughout your code. The following is a small sample of pseudocode that shows you how to override the event.

@Override public void onTrimMemory(int level) { if (level >= TRIM_MEMORY_MODERATE) {

//release resources here } }

Google also recommends that you avoid or at least reduce the use of bitmaps to lower the memory use when your app is running on the device. 

Don’t Use The Emulator For Real-World Testing

The Emulator in Android Studio is good for development and even debugging, but it doesn’t fully simulate a working Android device. You can consider basic environment features with the Emulator, but when it comes to testing, you should always use actual devices.

Of course, this is a huge investment for an Android developer, but it will make the entire development and testing life cycle much more efficient. It also ensures that you’re able to test your applications in various conditions as the user changes settings on the actual device. You can, however, use automated cloud solutions such as Amazon’s Testing platform.

Testing should never be taken lightly. It should be a major part when you design and deploy apps for your clients. Fewer bugs means happier users, and it can also mean a more successful app in Google Play. This doesn’t mean that you need to buy every device on the market to test your app on, but you should account for some of the more popular ones and the most common screen sizes.

As you know, JavaScript is the top programming language in the world, the language of the web, of mobile hybrid apps (like PhoneGap or Appcelerator), of the server side (like NodeJS or Wakanda) and has many other implementations. It’s also the starting point for many new developers to the world of programming, as it can be used to display a simple alert in the web browser but also to control a robot (using nodebot, or nodruino). The developers who master JavaScript and write organized and performant code have become the most sought after in the job market.

In this article, I’ll share a set of JavaScript tips, tricks and best practices that should be known by all JavaScript developers regardless of their browser/engine or the SSJS (Server Side JavaScript) interpreter.

Don’t forget “var” keyword when assigning a variable’s value for the first time.

Assignment to an undeclared variable automatically results in a global variable being created. Avoid global variables.

Use “===” instead of “==”

The == (or !=) operator performs an automatic type conversion if needed. The === (or !==) operator will not perform any conversion. It compares the value and the type, which could be considered faster than ==

[10] === 10    // is false

[10]  == 10    // is true

'10' == 10     // is true

'10' === 10    // is false

 []   == 0     // is true

 [] ===  0     // is false

 '' == false   // is true but true == "a" is false

 '' ===   false // is false 

undefined, null, 0, false, NaN, '' (empty string) are all falsy.

Use Semicolons for line termination

The use of semi-colons for line termination is a good practice. You won’t be warned if you forget it, because in most cases it will be inserted by the JavaScript parser. For more details about why you should use semi-colons.

Create an object constructor

function Person(firstName, lastName){

    this.firstName =  firstName;

    this.lastName = lastName;        

}  

var Khalid = new Person("Khalid", "Ansari");

Be careful when using typeof, instanceof and constructor.

typeof: a JavaScript unary operator used to return a string that represents the primitive type of a variable, don’t forget that typeof null will return “object”, and for the majority of object types (Array, Date, and others) will return also “object”.

constructor: is a property of the internal prototype property, which could be overridden by code.

instanceof: is another JavaScript operator that check in all the prototypes chain the constructor it returns true if it’s found and false if not.

var arr = ["a", "b", "c"];

typeof arr;   // return "object" 

arr  instanceof Array // true

arr.constructor();  //[]

Define a Self-calling Function

This is often called a Self-Invoked Anonymous Function or Immediately Invoked Function Expression (IIFE). It is a function that executes automatically when you create it, If you want to use this function you can write in the following way: 

(function(){

    // some private code that will be executed automatically

})();  

(function(p,q){

    var r = p+q;

    return r;

})(40,50);

Get a random item from an array

var items_array = [12, 548 , 'a' , 2 , 5478 , 'toogit' , 8852, , 'freelance' , 2145 , 119];

var  randomItem = items[Math.floor(Math.random() * items.length)];

Get a random number in a specific range

This code snippet can be useful when trying to generate fake data for testing purposes, such as a salary between min and max.

var x = Math.floor(Math.random() * (max - min + 1)) + min;

Generate an array of numbers with numbers from 0 to max

var numbersArray = [] , max = 100;

for( var i=1; numbersArray.push(i++) < max;);  // numbers = [1,2,3 ... 100] 

Generate a random set of alphanumeric characters

function generateRandomAlphaNum(len) {

    var rdmString = "";

    for( ; rdmString.length < len; rdmString  += Math.random().toString(36).substr(2));

    return  rdmString.substr(0, len);

}

Shuffle an array of numbers

var numbers = [5, 458 , 120 , -215 , 228 , 400 , 122205, -85411];

numbers = numbers.sort(function(){ return Math.random() - 0.5});

A better option could be to implement a random sort order by code (e.g. : Fisher-Yates shuffle), than using the native sort JavaScript function

A string trim function

The classic trim function of Java, C#, PHP and many other language that remove whitespace from a string doesn’t exist in JavaScript, so we could add it to the String object.

String.prototype.trim = function(){return this.replace(/^s+|s+$/g, "");};  

A native implementation of the trim() function is available in the recent JavaScript engines.

Append an array to another array

var array1 = [12 , "foo" , {name "Joe"} , -2458];

var array2 = ["Doe" , 555 , 100];

Array.prototype.push.apply(array1, array2);

Transform the arguments object into an array

var argArray = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments);

Verify that a given argument is a number

function isNumber(n){

    return !isNaN(parseFloat(n)) && isFinite(n);

}

Verify that a given argument is an array

function isArray(obj){

    return Object.prototype.toString.call(obj) === '[object Array]' ;

}

Note that if the toString() method is overridden, you will not get the expected result using this trick.

Or Use..

Array.isArray(obj); // its a new Array method

You could also use instanceofif you are not working with multiple frames. However, if you have many contexts, you will get a wrong result.

var myFrame = document.createElement('iframe');

document.body.appendChild(myFrame);

var myArray = window.frames[window.frames.length-1].Array;

var arr = new myArray(a,b,10); // [a,b,10]  

// instanceof will not work correctly, myArray loses his constructor 

// constructor is not shared between frames

arr instanceof Array; // false

Get the max or the min in an array of numbers

var  numbers = [5, 458 , 120 , -215 , 228 , 400 , 122205, -85411]; 

var maxInNumbers = Math.max.apply(Math, numbers); 

var minInNumbers = Math.min.apply(Math, numbers);

Empty an array

var myArray = [12 , 222 , 1000 ];  

myArray.length = 0; // myArray will be equal to [].

Don’t use delete to remove an item from array

Use splice instead of using delete to delete an item from an array. Using delete replaces the item with undefined instead of the removing it from the array.

Instead of…

var items = [12, 548 ,'a' , 2 , 5478 , 'foo' , 8852, , 'Doe' ,2154 , 119 ]; 

items.length; // return 11 

delete items[3]; // return true 

items.length; // return 11 

Use

var items = [12, 548 ,'a' , 2 , 5478 , 'foo' , 8852, , 'Doe' ,2154 , 119 ]; 

items.length; // return 11 

items.splice(3,1) ; 

items.length; // return 10 

Clearing or truncating an array

An easy way of clearing or truncating an array without reassigning it is by changing its length property value:

const arr = [11,22,33,44,55,66];

// truncanting

arr.length = 3;

console.log(arr); //=> [11, 22, 33]

// clearing

arr.length = 0;

console.log(arr); //=> []

console.log(arr[2]); //=> undefined

Simulating named parameters with object destructuring

Chances are high that you’re already using configuration objects when you need to pass a variable set of options to some function, like this:

doSomething({ foo: 'Hello', bar: 'Toogit!', baz: 42 });

function doSomething(config) {  

const foo = config.foo !== undefined ? config.foo : 'Hi';  const bar = config.bar !== undefined ? config.bar : 'Me!';  const baz = config.baz !== undefined ? config.baz : 13;  // ...

}

This is an old but effective pattern, which tries to simulate named parameters in JavaScript. The function calling looks fine. On the other hand, the config object handling logic is unnecessarily verbose. With ES2015 object destructuring, you can circumvent this downside:

function doSomething({ foo = 'Hello', bar = 'Toogit!', baz = 13 }) {  // ...}

And if you need to make the config object optional, it’s very simple, too:

function doSomething({ foo = 'Hello', bar = 'Toogit!', baz = 13 } = {}) {  // ...}

Object destructuring for array items

Assign array items to individual variables with object destructuring:

const csvFileLine = '1997,John Doe,US,john@doe.com,New York';const { 2: country, 4: state } = csvFileLine.split(',');

What is the difference between Java and JavaScript?

These are two different programming languages.

Javascript is a language that has gained tremendous popularity as a language on the web browsers to create dynamic and interactive web pages.

Java is a language that has got a similar popularity when you build a “backend” system, which is a fancy word for “almost anything”.

Despite the common prefix, they are not related; there creators are different and so are their origin stories (as highlighted by other answers). 

- JavaScript is a genius marketing scam that polluted the world of browsers exceptionally well. The browser reads JavaScript’s code line by line and executes it.

- Java is a general purpose language that is used almost everywhere, from Android mobile apps and cryptography to OS and cloud computing. Java’s code is stored in bytecoded format and then gets JIT compiled before the actual execution. In other words, it translates the bytecode to machine code.

- Java is class based. JS is prototype based. All objects, like Array or Function inherit from the Object.prototype which remains on top of the chain.

- JavaScript uses dynamic type checking (checks the variables while the code executes), unlike Java’s static checking system (variables are verified at compile time), which is more bug free.

- The word “Script.” It’s a joke, in case you didn’t get it.