Writing an Android Phone App

Once you understand how web services work you'll want to try your hand at writing a native phone application. See api101 if you need basic information on web services. To write an application for an Apple device there is one choice, learn java. The same choice exists for Android devices with the addition of an easier way. For reasons unknown people at mit created App Inventor whereby novice programmers can create Android applications without knowing java! This is similar to the way that Visual Basic can be used to write a windows application without needing to know the ins and outs of the windows api.

App Inventor is absolutely incredible. You drag and drop Lego® like programming blocks into a screen or screens to build an android app without having to know java. You can install the app on your phone and even put it in Google Play as I have done with an app I wrote. To get app into Google Play all you have to do is pay to register as an app developer ($25 change).

It helps to know a computer programming language. The same would be true of Visual Basic. You'd be successful faster if knew programming concepts and just had to learn how to use the tool. There are tons of App Inventor tutorials to help learn what the individual building blocks are capable of doing. There's a Web building block that lets you call web service and there are building blocks to parse out the data that is returned.

Here's an explanation of an Android app I wrote using App Inventor.