I plan to start working on an Android Java Application

[kevin Abel]

I reached the end of the Head First Java book.  

I have an idea for an app on my Android Phone.  

I know almost nothing about the Android SDK except for setting it up on my Windows laptop and exploring a little bit.

I found a tutor on preply.com to show me how to do this.  At 63 years old and 38 years of reading manuals to do things I deserve a tutor.  

I'll write the first version in Java.  If it works, I'll want to convert it to Kotlin before adding features.

This is a post for probable questions when I get stuck.

Thanks everyone,

Kevin

[Tim Moores]

Good luck! Sure, come back here with questions.

[Tim Holloway]

There's a cuple of Android books out there, although I can't name recent ones. Android is very different from desktop programming, though:

1. Android apps cycle through states so that they can multi-task more efficiently on "limited"* devices and mostly with single-ownership of the display.

2. Android is unlike Swing in that whereas in Swing graphics rendering is a subtask and the app logic is the main task, on Android, the graphics task is the main task and you have to run a sub-task if you want to do any extensive processing (such as a request to the SQLite database).

Just to make it more fun, if you rely on the Internet, you'll get confused because the tasking model has gone through about 4 major (and mostly-incompatible) revamps over Android's history. Currently the relative recent threading package in modern Java SDKs is the preferred way to go.

As a note, Kotlin is supposed to be designed to make some of Android's awkwardness more elegant, though I haven't really explored Kotlin myself. The Android Studio will quite happily convert a Java classs to Kotlin if you like, though. An Android app can be mixed Java and Kotlin.

[Tim Holloway]

*"limited". To about 100x the processing capabilities used by the Apollo space missions.