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123How I learned to develop Android apps in a little over a month

A month and two weeks ago, I knew nothing about Java. I knew some C from an intro class I took Freshman year of college. Today I released my first Android app. These are the steps I took.

Starting out

I started because I found myself with a good amount of free time, and wanted to do something constructive (3000+ hours of League of Legends was just too much). I looked up app development as I've always been interested, and was inspired by this post. Does it really take a year? I decided to try and find out.

First step was learning Java. I went through and did every exercise from this website, although I did skip the GUI/Graphics stuff because Android Studio would hopefully take care of it. This took me about 3-4 days. At the end of it, I had a pretty solid understanding of what Java is and fundamentally how to use it.

Learning Android Studio

So with Java under my belt (EDIT: okay not really but enough to start), I downloaded Android Studio from here and went straight to the Training course offered directly from Google (here).

At first, Android Studio was a nightmare. I had no idea what was going on. I spent a day trying to get the basic "Hello World" program to run, despite the code already being done (Google puts it in there at the start of a new project). Once I was able to do that, I simply tried adding things to it... a random text box, some buttons. This part was somewhat familiar, as it was similar to using the drawing tools in Microsoft Word (dragging and dropping shapes).

Once I had a inkling of how the user interface builder worked, I went further into Google's training program, learning how to start a new "Activity" (a new window in your app.. sorta) by pressing a button.

I found a few more similar tutorials on the web, and followed them just to learn how Android Studio works. All in all this took me about a week and a half.

Starting my first app

Someone once told me the golden rule to learning programming is simply to pick a random project and do it. So that's what I did. As a first project, picking a utility app (like a calculator, stopwatch, etc.) is easiest.

My idea was theoretically simple: make an app that will tell you which of your friends is the best at texting. I decided to make a list of project "implementation steps" and cross them out as I finished them. You can see my list here.

Programming my app

The next month, up to today, was spent building my app. The idea turned out to be much more complicated than I had thought, but I stuck to my plan. Most of my learning came from googling how to do something, finding a similar example, and trying to tweak it to fit my project. I became quite adept at googling.

I won't go into the details here, but the important thing is I now know enough to build a complete app.

Through this experience, I found a new passion for programming. Hopefully someone else reading this can too.

If you'd like to check out what I made, my app is on the play store.

TL;DR I went from nothing to making my first app in a little over a month, mostly by making a plan and sticking to it.