Google Play store had over 2.8 million Android apps available for download as of March 2017. That’s higher than the Apple App Store 2.2 million and Microsoft Windows’ 669,000 available apps. There are way more Android mobile devices on the market today than any other operating system, the demand for apps and experienced Android application developers is only going to continue to increase in the future.
Android developers are able to churn out all these apps much faster and more efficiently thanks to a profusion of sophisticated, integrated development environments (IDEs) as well as other time-saving tools and applications.
Here are the top tools currently being used for Android application development.
Ionic
Ionic is an HTML5 mobile app development framework. It is widely used for developing hybrid mobile apps. It is a useful tool to build mobile apps using web technologies like CSS, HTML5, and SASS. Ionic Framework is a 100% free and open source project. Build progressive web and native mobile apps for every major app store. It offers great tools and services to create highly interactive apps. It allows the web developer to create apps for all major app stores with a single code base. It comes with many CSS components and JavaScript components for developing mobile apps. Ionic emulates native app UI guidelines and uses native SDKs.
Android Studio
No list of Android development tools would be complete without Android Studio. This is the official IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for Android, making it the number one choice for the majority of developers looking to make basic apps in-keeping with Google’s Material Design and with access to all the advanced features of the platform.
FlowUp
Follow Up allows you to monitor the performance of all your production apps. Handy dashboards let you keep track of your stats and metrics, including CPU and disk usage, memory usage, frames per second, bandwidth, and more. FlowUp is a monthly subscription-based SaaS solution with pricing determined by the total number of users in the company.
Gradle
Back in 2013, Google endorsed Gradle as a build system for Android apps. Based on Apache Maven and Apache Ant, Gradle is one of the most popular development tools for creating large-scale applications involving Java. Developers like using Gradle in conjunction with Android Studio because it’s very easy to add external libraries using a single line of code.
Stetho
A powerful open-source debugging platform for Android, developed by Facebook, this tool makes debugging native Android apps as simple as debugging web pages using Chrome’s Developer Tools and helps perform various actions like checking the complete View hierarchy, inspecting SQLite database, and monitoring network operations with ease.
TensorFlow
TensorFlow was designed with mobile and embedded platforms in mind. Its an open-source software library for Artificial Intelligence. Its libraries make it easier to incorporate special features for Artificial Intelligence. It is an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. The flexible architecture allows deploying computation in a desktop, server, or mobile device with a single API. It is primarily used for deep learning in practice and research.
LeakCanary
LeakCanary is a powerful memory leak detection tool developed by Square, making the difficult and time-consuming job of detecting memory leaks so much easier. Once set up, it will automatically start giving you notifications whenever memory leaks happen in your app with complete stack trace to help you fix it.
AVD Manager
The AVD Manager tool is bundled with Android Studio. AVD stands for ‘Android Virtual Device’, so essentially this is an emulator for running Android applications on your PC. This is useful because it means that you can test your apps quickly without having to constantly install them on physical devices. More importantly, the AVD Manager allows you to create lots of different emulators with different screen sizes, specifications and versions of Android.
Source Tree
It makes any smartphone app developer’s trump card making his work on Git as efficient as it can get! Basically, this tool’s aimed at making Git cleanly organized so you can visualize all your work there – commits, changes, branches – in the form of an easy-to-navigate-through structure. And all this without the need to use the command-line! One that can only boost your productivity, as it helps you sweep through Git with great ease!
Unity 3D
Unity 3D is the first of our recommended Android developer tools that don’t come pre-installed with Android Studio. It is a game engine and IDE for cross-platform game development. Unity is easy to learn and comes with a large variety of features for game development. While it’s possible to create a game with Android Studio, Unity lends itself to that kind of work much more readily and will save you considerable amounts of time and headache.
Instabug
Instabug is used by some of the most recognizable names in the tech world, including Yahoo, PayPal, Lyft, BuzzFeed, and Mashable for beta testing and bug reporting. Instabug allows beta testers and user groups to share screenshots and detailed error logs with developers during the QA and debugging process. You can sign up for a free trial of Instabug and then it’s custom-priced based on the number of team members, apps, and the overall length of the project engagement.
DryRun
This really useful and innovative tool can let you test-run any Android library hosted online in just a few seconds. This tool makes it incredibly easy for you to try out various libraries that we discover daily with almost no effort.
Takt
A tiny library which you can use to check the FPS of every corner of your app while debugging it. It is always better to catch bugs and significant lags in the development phase and not letting your users have a chance of a bad experience while using the production app.
Scalpel
This innovative tool by Jake Wharton can let you experience a 3D visual representation of the entire layout of your app. Beginners can find it really fascinating as it can give them a completely new perspective of looking into your layouts.
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