Even if you don’t think we are fully in a Post-PC era, it is clear that mobile platforms play an essential role in many parts of our lives. Whether for fun or for profit, developing Android apps can be rewarding, both personally and financially. Assuming you have a certain level of technical knowledge then it is possible to develop Android apps yourself, but what programming languages do you need to learn?

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The official language for Android development is Java. Large parts of Android are written in Java and its APIs are designed to be called primarily from Java. It is possible to develop C and C++ app using the Android Native Development Kit (NDK), however it isn’t something that Google promotes. According to Google, “the NDK will not benefit most apps. As a developer, you need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks. Notably, using native code on Android generally does not result in a noticable performance improvement, but it always increases your app complexity.”

Java

The job of these virtual machines is to interpret the bytecode.

Java is a programming language first released by Sun Microsystems back in 1995. It can be found on many different types of devices from smartphones, to mainframe computers. You can use it on your desktop PC and even on the Raspberry Pi. Java doesn’t compile to native processor code but rather it relies on a “virtual machine” which understands an intermediate format called Java bytecode. Each platform that runs Java needs a virtual machine (VM) implementation. On Android the original VM is called Dalvik. Google has also started previewing its next generation VM called ART. The job of these virtual machines is to interpret the bytecode, which is really just a set of instructions similar to the machine code found in CPUs, and execute the program on the processor. The VMs use a variety of technologies including just-in-time compilation (JIT) and ahead-of-time compilation (AOT) to speed up the processes.

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What this all means is that you can develop Android apps on Windows, Linux or OS X and the Java compiler converts the source code into bytecode. This in turn is executed on the VM built-in to Android. This is different to the model used by iOS which uses a native compiler to turn Objective-C into ARM machine code.

Interested in reading more? Check out the original article over at Android Authority.