Learning Android Development In 2020 - A Practical Guide
By: Amit Shekhar
Tags: Android Apps, Android, Android App Development, Android Development, AndroidDev

I helped many Android Developers in learning Android Development and getting jobs as an Android Engineer and I will continue the same to help learners in getting started with Android Programming.

Sharing the knowledge, sharing the love

This article is for:

Anyone who wants to learn Android Development but have no idea where to start.

Also for anyone who has already started on Android Development but wants to learn the advanced topics.

Update: I have updated this article in 2021.

The goal is to provide a practical guide on how to learn Android Development in 2021. If this practical guide helps you in learning Android App Development, then my mission will be accomplished.

A complete guide for learning Android App development

Check Android Developer Roadmap on Github

All the Android Free Tutorials by MindOrks

How To Learn Android Development?

Getting started with the Android Development

First of all, you must have a basic knowledge of the Java language for Android Development. Learn the Java language from here [Link to learn Java ]

] Set up Android Studio IDE of Android Development on your PC or Laptop. Refer here.

Take a course or any book on Android app development with which you think you are comfortable. Being comfortable with the course or with the book is very important. When you take the course or read the book, always apply that on a sample app. I mean to say that build something on whatever you read.

Android Development Online Course for Beginners: This course is for beginners for those who want to get started with Android Development. In this course, you will learn Android Development and build two Android Applications: TodoNotes and Ride-Sharing Uber Android App.

Apply Now: MindOrks Android Online Course and Learn Advanced Android

There is no better way to learn something than by doing.

Learning the core of the Android Development

Understand the Activity Lifecycle as having the knowledge of the activity lifecycle is very important when it comes to building a bug-free application.

Understand the Fragment and its lifecycle. It is primarily to support more dynamic and flexible UI designs on large screens, such as tablets.

Learn how to debug your Android application as it is the single most important skill for any developer. Android Studio provides a debugger that allows you to do so many important things.

Know about the navigations, task and back stack. Android Activities are the logical construct of the screens that we want a user to navigate through. The relation that each Activity holds with respect to other is very crucial for good user experience.

Understanding the Context In Android Application. To develop a better Android app, we must know what context is? Context is almost everywhere in Android Development and it is the most important thing in the Android Development, so we must understand to use it correctly.

Learn about the threading in detail. As the Java Virtual Machine allows an application to have multiple threads of execution running concurrently. We must know how to take advantage of multi-threading environment correctly.

Learn about the Threading Performance: Threading Performance 101. (Android Performance Patterns Season 5, Ep. 1)

Understand Android Threading: Understanding Android Threading. (Android Performance Patterns Season 5, Ep. 2)

Learn Memory & Threading: Memory & Threading. (Android Performance Patterns Season 5, Ep. 3)

Understand Threadpools: Swimming in Threadpools. (Android Performance Patterns Season 5, Ep. 6)

Learn how to handle the configuration changes. Some device configurations can change during the runtime such as screen orientation, keyboard availability, and when the user enables multi-window mode. We must know how to handle these changes.

Know about the 3rd party libraries. We have Mindorks Android Store to browse through all the important Android libraries, projects, tools, and apps. Compare them with their GitHub stars.

Understanding the Android Core. Looper, Handler, and HandlerThread are the Android’s way of solving the problems of asynchronous programming. They are not old school, but a neat structure on which a complex android framework is built.

Learn about Service and IntentService. A service is a component that is used to perform operations on the background such as playing music, handle network transactions, interacting content providers etc. It doesn’t have any UI (user interface).

Explore when you should consider using ArrayMap for better performance of the Android application.

Learn about the tools to get the metrics of memory usage, CPU usage, and etc. There are a few metrics that you should measure continuously while android application development.

Learn about location and maps.

Learn about creating Custom View. To develop a better Android app, we must know how to create custom views.

Always focus more on learning techniques not so many frameworks. This helps in the longer run. As an example, I wrote on: How The Android Image Loading Library Glide and Fresco Works?

Practical Guide To Solve OutOfMemoryError in Android Application

Holding reference of objects that are not required anymore is a bad practice, freeing object’s reference after being served is helpful for the garbage collector to kill that object, that eventually helps yourself in memory leaks issues. If you keep objects reference unnecessarily, it only leads to memory leaks. Learn how to detect and fix the memory leaks in the Android application.

Learn about the performance patterns in Android applications. How to improve the performance of your application.

Learn Garbage Collection in Android: Android Performance Patterns: Garbage Collection in Android

Learn about Invalidations, Layouts, and Performance.

Understand Android UI and the GPU.

Understand Android Performance Patterns: Why 60fps?

Understand Android Performance Patterns: Tool — Profile GPU Rendering.

Understand Bitmaps. As it takes a huge amount of memory, can lead to OOM easily. Users love content! Especially when the content is well formatted and looks nice. Images, for instance, are extremely nice content, mainly due to their property of conveying a thousand words per image. They also consume a lot of memory. A lot of memory!

Learn the Android Architecture Components.

Learn about writing tests.

Learn RxJava. Nowadays RxJava is a must for developing an Android app.

Learn Kotlin.

Learn Kotlin Coroutines.

Learn about the dependency injection, Dagger.

Learn about Android Jetpack. Google released Android Jetpack. Android Jetpack is built to make app development fast. It is the next generation of Android components which brings together the benefits of the support library, backward compatibility and immediate updates to a larger set of components. Android Jetpack manages activities like background tasks, navigation, and lifecycle management, so you can eliminate boilerplate code and focus on what makes your app great. Android Jetpack is designed to work well with Kotlin, saving you even more code with Android KTX.

Learn about MVP architecture.

Learn the Data Structures

Learn how to apply proguard in an Android application. It is a tool used to minify the code, obfuscate the code, and optimize the code which reduces the size of the application.

Read about the security tips to build a secure Android application.

Know about the Android Useful tools. As we all are fortunate to live in a world where everyone builds a tool to help each other. These tools make the development fast and our life easier. Do not forget to explore and use these tools.

Read others code. This is the best thing a developer can do and learn to code in the best way. I personally feel that I have learned a lot from the code of the open-source apps.

Know about the Android development best practices.

Learn Git. It is a version control system for tracking changes in computer files and coordinating work on those files among multiple people.

Learn the fundamentals of Git and GitHub from here.

Know how to improve your code with lint checks

Know about the Gradle Build Tool.

Contribute to open source projects. I love open source. It has really helped me a lot to improve myself. So, start contributing to open source.

Know about Continuous Integration. Continuous integration ensures that your code is building on a server that is not your own machine. Use CI like Jenkins, Circle CI, Travis, and etc.

Become more productive in android with android studio plugins.

Always be updated with the new technology in Android. If you miss it, you simply miss it. The best way to be always updated is to join a community or follow some twitter accounts. You can join Mindorks Community as we always keep posting new things in the Slack group.

Link to join the Mindorks Community on Slack.

We also post updates on Twitter about all the new things in Android. So, follow us on Twitter.

Mindorks Facebook Page.

Open this link and subscribe to the channel and become a part of the largest learning revolution.

Also, hear the android developer backstage podcasts to know about the awesome things happening in Android.

Watch and learn about the Android Performance Patterns from the series of video directly from the Android Developers Channel.

After all. If you want an awesome job, prepare for the job interview from here.

MindOrks has also started a video series on How to prepare for Android Interview?

Check here.

Check All Free Android Tutorials By MindOrks.

Learn to build a ride-sharing Android app like Uber, Lyft.

Last Step:

Bookmark this article to refer again, learn Android App Development, and become a better Android Developer.

Happy Learning :)

Want to know more about me? Visit amitshekhar.me.