This is the third post in my Start to Finish series. Last time I talked about source control with Git. We’ve talked about basic tools, and about source control, so now we’re ready to get into actually creating an Android app. In this part of the series, we’re going to create a new project using Android Studio. Android Studio is Google’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that we will use to create our Android app.

This is the second post in my Start to Finish series. You can check out my first post introducing the series and my tools here. What is SCM? SCM, or source code management, is a system that helps developers manage the source code for their projects. They have been around forever, things like CVS, Subversion (SVN) and now Git are the popular ones. SCMs allow you to version your source code, which is why they are also called Version Control Systems.

If you checkout the Android Development community on Google+, you’ll find a lot of people asking how to get started building an app for Android. Though quite a general question that can’t really be answered in a social post, I understand how frustrating it can be to figure out where to get started. There are plenty of tutorials on the web about how to accomplish specific tasks, but these generally don’t cover the higher level parts of app development like version control and layout analysis.

For years iOS developers have touted the merits of the Simulator, saying that it makes their lives easier. As someone who’s developer for both iOS and Android, and been primarily an Android developer for several years, I’ve never cared. When I develop, I use a device. I’ve often made arguments about how it better to develop on a device because that is what users will run your app on. The Android Emulator is good in the sense that it’s not a Simulator, but actually emulates the Android hardware.

It’s been a few weeks since my last post, in large part because of all of the work I’ve been doing for Hashnote. For those who don’t know, in the beginning of August Hashnote was featured on Google Play in the Play Picks section. Here’s how it went. Before In January of 2012, I decided to leave my 9 to 5 and start my own business as a freelance Android developer.

I recently shared how I use Git to automatically track my versions. There’s quite a bit more to my git workflow than just tagging versions, though, so I’d like to dive into my git usage just a little more. One of my clients introduced me to a very popular, and useful, git branching strategy commonly called Git-Flow based on Vincent Driessen’s branching model. I highly recommend reading his article, it’s quite good and describes a very useful branching model.

One of the challenges of programming projects is versioning. I’ve always tried to find a simple way to bump version and build number in a meaningful way that uniquely identifies a build. Back in the Subversion days this was easy, since Subversion is a centralized version control system that assigns a unique, incrementing revision number to each commit. Free build numbers! Then all you have to do is assign a marketing version number (something like 1.

App ratings are an extremely factor in any app. No matter what app store you are on, people value the opinions of other users. Google has always said that high Play Store ratings are an important factor in getting your app featured. I won’t pretend that I know a magic bullet to get endless 5 start reviews, but here are a few things I’ve learned along the way. Communicate I get emails from my users.

This morning, like many others, I decided to take a look at the Android version distribution of Hashnote and was pleasently surprized with what I found. A few months ago I decided to take Hashnote ICS+ only after realizing that only a small portion of my install base was on pre-ICS devices. I still think that was a good choice as it’s made development much easier and allowed me to do more in the limited free time I have to work on Hashnote.

I’ve been using ant to build my Android projects for as long as I can remember. There are many reasons for this, like build consistency and workstation agnosticism, but you can read this article if you want to check that out. Ant is a good tool, but never offered the flexibility that I would have liked in a project. That’s where Gradle steps in. After seeing all of the power of the new Gradle build system, I knew I had to convert Hashnote to Gradle.