Android
Android is the Windows of the future in terms of distribution, as personal computing moves towards touch-input devices.
Its technical capabilites are tailored towards the use on mobile device, including sensors and touch input. It is an open-source operating system based on Linux. Applications are programmed on top of the Java Android
SDK and usually with the help of the open-source development environment Eclipse.
Device fragmentation is a great challenge for App developers and publishers.
Request our report about the technologies and strategies to support a majority of user devices.
App development is often not straight forward, because the software development kits and devices are still evolving rapidly.
Thus it is a challenge for a business to estimate the costs of 'having' an App on the market.
Request our study about the effort of development, testing and maintenance of Android applications.
App complexity and costs - Android or iOS
We have experience in developing simple to complex applications, depending on your needs:
Simple
2 days design
3 weeeks development
1 weeek testing
5 test devices
Normal
4 days design
2 months development
2 weeeks testing
5 test devices
Complex
1 week design
3 months development
3 weeek testing
5 test devices
Design
The first part of developing an App is deciding, what the App should present to the user (view),
how it should react to the user input (controller) and how data is stored (model). Depending on the
complexity of the application, this can take 3 to 10 days.
Development
The above components are called Model-View-Controller and each can be more or less developed
seperately. There are designers for creating the layout and style of the views (e.g. with Photoshop),
back-end developers who program the server-side of the application for storing data (e.g. with PHP)
and developers who implement the views that handle user input and that
are connected to the back-ends (with Java). Depending on the complexity of the application, this
can take 2 to 12 weeks.
Testing
Testing is a crucial part of App development, ecspecially on Android. A plethora of devices exist
and they differ so much in hardware features and software versions, that applications
will not run the same on many of them.
50 percent of the devices in usage can be covered by about 10 test devices, but to cover more
than 80 percent would require more than 1000.
A special strategy has to be followed to choose a subset of devices, which cover most
possible variations. At the end and during development,
testing accounts to about two to six weeks.