Google improving the tools app developers use is just as important as any Android update
Most of us are glad we have a smartphone. We enjoy the things we can do with one, depend on one for many of our day-to-day tasks, and carry one around with us all of the time. With the right phone, your life is better in a lot of ways.
Did you ever stop to think about why? Buying the right phone can be hard because there are so many to choose from, but once that’s done we usually just start using it without a thought about the things that make a phone useful.
None of those things would be possible without people developing software that gets added on top of Android. You might not know, but Android is really basic; it’s mostly just software that can boot up a phone, support the hardware inside of it, and provide a platform for other software to run. It’s that other software that you love to use or depend on every day.
That’s why I think the most important updates to come out of Google are the ones for the “official” developer tools. Improvements to the Android Studio development environment and the other tools developers need are why you want to use your phone.
I’m not an app developer. I have written a handful of apps for both Android and iOS to learn how the process works, but I’ve never even tried to write an app you would want to use. That experience did teach me a few things, though; the tools are more important than anything else Google can do to further Android as a platform.
A recent update to the Android emulator (software that “runs” Android so apps can be tested in a live setting) is a great example. Almost every developer depends on the emulator, and there are some issues with it. It would get sluggish or lock up after a while on even the strongest computer hardware. Google decided to focus on improving it, and the most recent update is great. It’s still not perfect, but Google hasn’t said it is done working on it.
Google hasn’t always done a good job here. It’s easy to become an Android app developer, and if you’re familiar with any sort of software development, you could have an app ready for the Play Store in a few hours. Throw all of that out the window when you’re talking about a good app, though. In the beginning, terrible developer tools meant a million terrible apps in the Play Store for every good one. People don’t want to write terrible apps, and thankfully, Google realized how important it was to support anyone — including you — who wants to make the next great Android app.
Writing an application that people will want to use is hard. First, you need to come up with the right idea, work through the issues that you know will arise as you get started, find ways to make your software work with thousands of different devices, and then write the good code that makes an app great. Without the right tools, most of this is going to be very difficult.
You’re probably not an app developer, and improvements to these tools and new features in Android Studio probably don’t seem very exciting to you. You only need to understand that these updates are important — sometimes more important than an update you’ll get on your phone.
These are the things that make your phone, and Android as a whole, better.
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