It's always good to read a brief summary about Android development so everyone that it is involved in the mobile world can know about this technology and be on the same page every time there's an Android discussion.
Developers who build Android apps use a combination of programming languages like Kotlin and/or Java to implement the logic and UX, XML to design the screens and navigation, scripts for project configuration and integration of third-party libraries. The app can run in every Android device such as smartphones, tablets, TVs, cars, and smartwatches.
Nowadays, most developers choose Kotlin as their default programming language, focusing on material design for the UX, choosing the design pattern that fits their app requirements such as MVVM or MVI, JetPack components (Navigation, LiveData, Paging, Room), Kotlin Flow or StateFlow and libraries like Coroutines or RxJava for async work, Retrofit for communication with web services, Picasso or Glide for images, Dagger 2 or Koin for dependency injection, being able to target the most used versions of Android (Android 10 or 11)
An amazing platform called Firebase brings us the ability of integrating some extra functionalities into our app. Firebase provides us with databases, web services, push notifications, analytics, crash report, distribution, and testing. Also there are some CI/CD tools like Bitrise, TFS, AppCenter, Jenkins, and Github where we can do all the build/deploy/distribution processes just with one click - we could use it to perform extra operations before releasing an app to the Play Store.
The goal for an Android project is to go live on Play Store - this can be achieved after signing your app with your developer key store and/or credentials. Finally, after uploading our app, we just have to wait for Google's approval (this applies to both the Alpha and Beta process), the stage before Production. The Alpha and Beta versions will allow us to test our application in a suitable environment. Then, it's time to take our app to Production, and wait for users' input which will help us improve our app through time, releasing newer versions and gaining more users!
