The Android Effect

By Author: Kelly Burby
Total Articles: 349
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There is an impressive growth in mobile application development industry. The credit fairly goes to the increasing sale of smartphones which is higher than that of PCs or laptops. According to the studies, the sales ratio of smartphones to PCs is 3:1 per year and half of these smartphones are powered by Google’s operating system Android. As we all know Google already rules the internet search engine domain it has rooted itself deeply in our day-to-day lives. For many people, internet just means Google. Every search begins with Google and results the search engine in processing more than a billion search requests per day.

Google completely dominates the search engine world and somewhat same is happening in the smartphone world as well as mobile handsets with Google’s OS Android are ruling the market. More than 50% of smart devices all over the world run on Google’s Android OS. It has left other operating systems, e.g. Apple’s iOS, Microsoft’s Windows Phone and RIM’s BlackBerry far behind in the race.

Google entered the smartphone market in 2008 and now its OS Android is world’s most popular and the ...
... most successful mobile platform. The USP helps Android to continuously have a lead over others is open source. Other aspects are the support of a largest community of mobile application developers, easily available developing tools and of course, the use of Java in developing Android applications.

Previous to Android, the experience of mobile application was much substandard to that of desktop applications. Google identified that the cause was a lot of restrictions limiting developers to add their original creativity with the mobile apps. We can better exemplify the restrictions in application development by the Apple’s strategy of not easily supporting the programs of third party developers. Apple feared that the third party applications could replace the inbuilt applications and original functionalities of iOS.

On the other hand, Google launched Android OS as an open source platform with almost no restrictions for customizing the source code and mobile applications for deriving maximum productivity. This policy encouraged lots of mobile application developers. The support of Java also attracted those programmers who already had good Java programming skills.

Developers also found that Android had totally different policy for approving the apps developed by third party developers. The procedure to get apps approved for other platforms, e.g. iOS was time consuming as well as expensive but this is not the case with android application development. Android has been instantaneously allowing developers to publish the developed application on the app stores. This procedure saves considerable time and money. Before developers can publish applications on Google Play, they are required to register as a Google Play developer. All they have to do is create a developer’s profile, pay a registration fee, agree to the Google Play Developer Distribution Agreement and then they can get their apps published.

Android application development saves many resources. Developing the application on this OS is cheaper than developing application for other operating systems.

For more info about android application development contact Rapidsoft Technologies.