I’ll admit it. I’ve been watching my new phone — a RedMagic 6R Android gaming phone, which I wrote about in this article — travel from the factory in Hong Kong all the way to my house in Tampa.
As I write this, it landed in FedEx’s Memphis facility two hours ago.
Soon!
If you’re a regular podcast listener and an Android developer (or an aspiring Android developer), you’ll want to check out these podcasts. Not only are they informative, but they’re also active, or in other words, they’re still in the process of making more episodes. Add them to your playlist and deepen your Android knowledge!
This is probably the longest-running Android developer podcasts. Hosted by Nick and Romain, two developers from the Android engineering team, Android Developers Backstage covers topics of interest to Android programmers, with in-depth discussions and interviews with engineers on the Android team at Google.
Jetpack Compose, the reactive data-driven UI toolkit for Android, has finally hit the 1.0 stage, and it’s included in the “Arctic Fox” release of Android Studio. It’s the hot new thing, and Android Developers Backstage is right on top of it, with several recent episodes covering different aspects of Jetpack Compose.
For sheer volume of developer-focused episodes and topics, you can’t beat Fragmented, the Android-centric developer podcast hosted by Donn Felker and Kaushik Gopal. While they do talk a lot about Android, they focus on all sorts of topics that are relevant to software developers of all stripes, such as the importance of having a growth mindset, the importance of code conventions, the three things every developer needs to be able to do, growing an online presence in the software industry, and more.
I’m sure that there are still lots of Android developers out there who prefer to code in Java, but as far as I’m concered, Kotlin is the Android programming language. And wouldn’t you know it — there is a Kotlin programming podcast, and it comes straight from the source: JetBrains, the dev tool vendor behind Android Studio and Kotlin. Better still, it’s hosted by Kotlin’s best advocate, Hadi Hariri, JetBrains’ VP of Developer Advocacy.
This is the official Android developer podcast, put together by the Android team. It provides summaries of what the Android team has been up to that you, the developer should know about. It covers library and platform releases, articles, videos, podcasts, samples, code labs — whatever seems relevant and interesting for Android developers.
Lately, there’ve been a number of episodes covering the beta version of the upcoming Android 12.
“All About Android” is aptly named: For over 500 episodes, they’ve been covering all sorts of Android developments — “the biggest news, freshest hardware, best apps and geekiest how-tos”.
Samsung, the people behind what’s considered to be the Android flagship phone, have a developer podcast: POW! The Samsung Developers Podcast. It’s hosted Samsung senior developer evangelist Tony Morelan, Sr..
This is the official podcast of my friends at RayWenderlich.com, the premier mobile development tutorial site. RayWenderlich.com started off as an iOS dev tutorial site (it’s how I learned), but they’ve expanded to cover Android, Unity, and Flutter development, and so has the podcast.
This weekend, I placed an order for a RedMagic 6R from Nubia, the high-end branch of ZTE who’ve been making some interesting phones specifically for gaming. For US$500, you get the same processors as those in Samsung’s flagship phone, the Galaxy S21…
| Chipset | Qualcomm SM8350 Snapdragon 888 5G (5 nm) |
| CPU | 8 Kryo 680 cores: 📱 1 running at 2.84 GHz 📱 3 running at 2.42 GHz 📱 4 running at 1.80 GHz |
| GPU | Adreno 660 |
…paired with an AMOLED screen that has a crazy 144 Hz refresh rates. With specs like these, it’s no wonder that it made GSMArena’s Best gaming phones 2021 buyer’s guide.
Want to know more about the RedMagic 6R? Here’s GSMArena’s video review:
My father-in-law needed an upgrade from his flip phone from the pleistocene epoch, so I decided to give him my current phone, a Moto One Hyper, and get a new one. The original plan was to go with my go-to Android phone vendor, Motorola (who typically give great bang for the buck), and get the G100.
But after seeing that the RedMagic 6R goes for the same price and with flagship specs (here’s a side-by-side spec chart for the 6R and the G100), I decided to make the leap.
Because I’m not in a complete hurry to get the phone and because I have some serious writing and editing to do this week and don’t want to be distracted by sweet new gear, I decided to be true to my Asian-ness and save about $80 by ordering the phone and a protective case directly from Nubia/ZTE rather than going through Amazon Prime and getting it the next day.
(Besides, I didn’t feel like buying Jeff Bezos more midlife crisis spaceship parts today.)
The phone left the warehouse in Yuen Long (a town in Hong Kong’s western New Territories), and is currently making its way to me in Tampa via FedEx.
What will I do with a gaming phone? Build apps for it with my newly-purchased gaming laptop by getting more familiar with this development tool:
I’ll post an unboxing video and other notes when it arrives. Watch this space!
While you can learn Android programming alone and on your own, it’s often helpful to learn in a group setting, where you can ask questions, share ideas, and tackle problems together. That’s where Android Study Jams come in.
Android Study Jams are community events where people get together to learn how to build Android apps. Android Study Jam participants work through a curriculum created by Google that allows everyone to work at their own pace. These Jams are led by facilitators who organize events in their area and invite others to join and learn.
GDG SunCoast is the Tampa Bay area Google Developer Group, a group for developers and aspiring developers who are interested in Google’s developer technology. It covers everything developer-y that Google offers, such as Android, Java & Kotlin, Firebase, Progressive Web Apps with Polymer, Angular web apps, Google Cloud Platform), machine learning with TensorFlow and more.
GDG Suncoast has a regular online Android Study Jams session, and there’s one every Wednesday evening in August! They’re online, and they’re free — all you need is a computer that can run Android Studio (a Windows machine made in the last 5 to 6 years, or a Mac made in the last 10 years can do it). Check out their Meetup page, set aside an hour on Wednesday evenings, and learn some Android programming!
And in case you needed a reason to learn Android programming, check out these stats from ZipRecruiter:
If your interest is piqued, there’s an Android Study Jam this Wednesday.
While checking LinkedIn this morning, I noticed that there were a lot of iOS and Android developer jobs in the Tampa Bay area, and many of them didn’t have any applicants (or at least any applicants who applied via LinkedIn).
I quickly cobbled the image above from screenshots of LinkedIn’s Jobs sections that I took this morning. If you know UIKit from SwiftUI or can tell your RecyclerViews from your ListViews and either live in Tampa Bay or want to move to our sunny shores, there’s a lot of opportunity right here, right now.
Want to know how much you can make as an Android developer? Here’s what ZipRecruiter has to say:
Here’s ZipRecruiter’s graph for iOS developers:
…and trust me on this one: If you can combine mobile development skills with people skills, you can make a little more.
We’ve got a GDG (Google Developer Group) right here in Tampa Bay — GDG SunCoast — and they host an Android Study Jam every Wednesday evening. It’s an online event that’s free of charge to attend, and they walk you through Google’s official Android/Kotlin tutorials. It’s a great place to get to know other locals with an interest in Android development, ask questions, and even win prizes!
GDG SunCoast’s next Android Study Jam happens on Wednesday, July 7 at 7:00 p.m..
I’m going to try and catch as many of these as I can. I hope to see you there!
A few years back, I started the Tampa iOS Meetup with Angela Don, and over time, it mutated into Programmers of Portables.
The pandemic, my job search, and a lot of work at Auth0 have kept me from holding a meetup in some time, but I’m already working on plans to bring it back. Watch this space, and get ready to learn iOS, Android, and IoT development tricks!
Speaking of Auth0…
Keep an eye on the Auth0 developer blog, where I’m one of the editors. I’m working on a lot of articles about mobile and Python development, and you’ll start seeing them there soon!
On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs said this near the beginning of the Stevenote where he introduced the original iPhone:
Three things: A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device.
An iPod. A phone. And an internet communicator.
An iPod! A phone! Are you getting it?!
These are not three separate devices. This is one device…
Today is the 14th anniversary of that keynote. It caused Google to go back to the drawing board with Android. It led to the redefinition of the mobile phone and the downgrading or demise of the big hardware players of the day (BlackBerry, Motorola, Nokia, and Palm). It changed Microsoft’s trajectory, and brought about the end of Flash. It redefined the boundaries of personal computing and the web. For better and worse, it changed the way we communicate, navigate, “vegetate”, and relate.
Happy anniversary, iPhone!
XDA Developers has released what is purportedly a leaked photo of one of the next Samsung Galaxy phones, shown above. The series is expected to go under the name “S20”, with the phone above being the Galaxy S20+.
The version number of the Galaxy phones have generally followed the iPhone’s, which is probably why they’re leaping from 10 to 20 (in case you’d forgotten, the current flagship iPhone is the 11).
While Samsung’s leap in version numbers is a big one, the concept of a version number leap is nothing new. Those of us who were working in the industry in the ’90s may remember Macromedia Freehand’s leap from version 5 to 7, completely bypassing 6, back in 1996. This was a response to Adobe Illustrator 6:
Jumping version numbers is easy compared to actual hardware changes, but Samsung are doing it anyway, with a fourth camera to counter the iPhone 11’s three. It reminds me of this Onion article which became real:
I’ll close this article with the early contender for the title of “Sticker of the Year”:
