A good method for testing the installation of a compiler or a development environment is to try a “Hello World” example. It just displays a text such as “Hello World” on the screen. OK, I know it is not an app that you’d be proud of showing to your family or friends but its usefulness stems from testing whether your programming environment is working properly and to see if you’re ready to go for real projects.
In our very first Android project, we will develop an app in which the “Hello, World!” text will be shown in the middle of the device screen. We will test it on the emulator we created before but if you have access to an Android device, you can test your “Hello World” app on it too. I’d like to point out general steps of app development before setting off for developing our first app:
- Creating an Android Studio project,
- Setting up the User Interface (UI) of the app,
- Connecting the UI components such as buttons, textboxes, etc. to the Java code,
- Coding in Java – the actual programming part
- Building the project: this means creating the executable (file that actually runs on device or the emulator). This is not difficult as it sounds; Android Studio does the entire job with a single click,
- Trying the app on an emulator,
- Running the app on a real Android device (optional),
- Publishing the app on Google Play (optional).