Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Hoping to train myself up in app development for iPhone or android (or both - android sounds like the growth area). Googling best language/dev environments leads to a large number of options, and I'd prefer to not run down unnecessary rabbit holes.

Preference is for free environment (licence, not open source necessarily), but one that is commercially popular so I have the potential to gain remote part time work once I am skilled up. Would also like the ability to develop own apps.

Crossplatform ideal but not necessary I guess to start out.

Happy to learn programming language obviously.

Anyone with practical experience who can recommend something sensible?

I own a PC.

I have no idea, but if you find something matching those criterion, i'de like to know.

I'm not a mobile developer, but I do know Microsoft has put a lot of money into visual studio code and Xamarin.

Visual Studio Community is also free, but might be tougher to get started on.

Paying for courses through something like pluralsight could be worth it.

If you are starting from scratch I'd forget the phone bit for a while and just learn Python. It has excellent documentation, the learning curve is shallow, there are a ton of YouTube videos on it, it is used for serious work if you want to pursue a career in it and it will run fine on your Windows machine.

@ducknalddon Have you used Python to develop mobile apps? I would get up to speed reasonably quickly having done some programming in my youth.

Android Studio (java) for Android. XCode (swift) for iOS. Last I recall you need a mac for iOS development?

Cross Platform is meh and I don't know what most people prefer to do. Obviously Xamarin is what shows up when you search around but I've heard bad things as well. It largely depends on what your use-case is (what device/OS or other 3rd party features you will need). If it's not such UI related stuff (say you are just doing number crunching) Android/iOS both support shared libs so you can pretty much program in any language you want if you can output a no system dependencies shared lib w/ C interface and access that from the higher levels (probably too complex for beginner..). There may be some tools out there that do this for you already? Maybe people roll their own abstraction layers..

You could also look into web apps that are probably easy to port to mobile apps (React Native?)

Maybe look at app developer job postings of companies with popular apps and see what skills and experience they are asking for.

Once I "invested" in a MacBook thinking app development was a fast track to early retirement. It was a fantastic computer but I never made a dollar. Blame Tim Ferriss for me trying.

For iOS development there are ways around the Mac requirement, but it's extra work. In addition to Xcode (free) you'll need a developer subscription ($99/year) to test your apps on real hardware and get your apps in the store.

Delay getting the developer subscription until you have completed the tutorials and made something worthy of testing. In my case, ~100 hours and some programming experience got me to the level where I could make anything I wanted using basic interfaces. It was fun running my custom apps but I never made anything good enough to sell. There's a lot of competition.

Thanks guys for the tips. If I make any progress, I will be sure to report back.

Did wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 05, 2017 2:18 pm

@ducknalddon Have you used Python to develop mobile apps? I would get up to speed reasonably quickly having done some programming in my youth.

Sorry, I misunderstood and thought you were starting from scratch.

bryan wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 05, 2017 5:35 pm

Android Studio (java) for Android. XCode (swift) for iOS. Last I recall you need a mac for iOS development?

bryan is on point.

android == java == 'open' (and available on all platforms)
ios == mac == 'not open'

bryan wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 05, 2017 5:35 pm

Cross Platform is meh and I don't know what most people prefer to do.

on point again. cross platform is usually a year or more behind and doesn't deliver 100% of what native does. depends on what the goal is: getting a job/becoming a professional => native. just messing around, doing that one cool idea, just getting something out the door: any cross platform will likely be fine.

thanks Brute

I'd say there is no "best" tool. App development is a commodity now.
Also the tools are changing all the time, for example now the following toolchain is "hot" https://blog.twitter.com/2017/how-we-built-twitter-lite .

White bread is a commodity. There are still well paid jobs all over the world for app development. I doubt twitter paid someone 3 bucks an hour out of india.

$3 is unlikely. in fact, purely anecdotally, Twitter pays some humans enough to rent a $4k/mo apartment on market street, only a few blocks from Twitter's office.

mobile is growing much faster than desktop or web. phones are getting new features faster than regular computers. brute suspects mobile devs will be hot for another decade or more.

I am willing to pay $300 for the design with prototype of a solar-powered robot that can visually recognize pests harmful to orchard fruit, climb trees, and exude a biodegradable liquid-to-glue-spray with which to hit and trap the pests. If it can also multi-task for "weed"-munching and/or random-continual intelligent design seed-planting duty, I might go as high as $450!!!

that would pay for about 1.05 hours of work in the industry Did is trying to get into

@7wb5 - Where do you want them delivered?

https://www.amazon.com/1500-Live-Ladybu ... B00533KOIC
https://phys.org/news/2016-06-spiders-e ... pests.html

@BRUTE: Well, I guess he better get snappy then. I might be persuaded to throw in pie-of-the-month club lifetime membership.

@jacob: lol- My design suggestion was influenced by some articles on bio-mimicry high-tech engineering I read in elementary school science weekly magazine. I will probably need some frogs and some birds in addition to the ladybugs and spiders.

@Did : By commodity I meant it is readily available widely for a predictable cost.

To take your bread example: White bread is a commodity, but artisan hand made gluten free French rye bread commands a high price.

It is the similar with apps.

@fish - I'm just curious but what what were your custom apps?

@did - please do keep us updated!