How to create an Android app

General Web Dev
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Hi,

I am interested in using the GPS on my Android phone to measure how far I walk but am not keen on sharing that data with the company providing the app that measures it. I did find an app that seems to not send my data to anyone - “Walk Meter”. Unfortunately, if I go indoors for any length of time it seems to make a bad guess at where I am and therefore deduces that instead of sitting down in a coffee shop I have walked eg a mile and back - in other words it is unreliable if I go indoors.

This lead me to wonder whether I could could learn to code an app myself. Googling did not reveal an obvious way to learn how to do this. I see that Kotlin, which seems to be closely related to Java, is the language used in Android apps. I have some experience with PHP (and HTML, CSS and MySQL) and a very small amount with Javascript. I am happy to try and teach myself whatever language I need to. I what would be the best approach? I don’t much like using YouTube videos - I prefer written tutorials or books.

I would envisage the app having a start and stop button and obtaining the GPS coordinates eg every 15 secs and calculating the distance travelled and adding that to as running total but disregarding the value if the distance is an unrealistic one.

Google led me to https://developer.android.com/training/basics/firstapp but I found the videos of unnaturally perky individuals getting over excited about issuing “earnable badges” really annoying (since successfully completing my potty training some years ago I hasve no need for meaningless stars/badges).

The other problem with Googling the question or searching on here is that there is a lot of out of date information out there.

(I have no interest in creating anything for sale or in craeting iPhone apps).

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I now see that https://developer.android.com/training/basics/firstapp/ does have written tutorials without the annoying videos.

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I did help build an app some years ago using the ionic framework.

It was far out of my comfort zone and I have now forgotten every single thing about it but it did in the end produce a workable app. I wouldn’t want to do it again though :slight_smile:

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If it is only for your own android device, develop it native in Java with android studio. It’s the absolute easiest way.
All this multi platform frameworks like kotlin etc are really hard to learn and will not give you any advantage.

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Someone shared this on another board that I’m apart of that was built without code using online cloud services. I was fairly impressed with what could be achieved without requiring programming knowledge.

https://map.circle-hand.com

Tools:

There is also the strategy of converting a JavaScript app to a native phone app.

After having evaluated many of these I have chosen to champion Capacitor JS for my own work with Angular. Building Angular sites and quickly turning them into native apps. I haven’t begin doing this yet but given the current landscape Capacitor seems like a great modern tool for existing JavaScript sites.

One of the crowning achievement of Capacitor is ease of access to native APIs and extensions.

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