If I Was to Start Android Again... THIS Is How I Would Do It!

hey guys welcome back to new video in this video i will give you my view on i kind of if if somebody came over and now took all my knowledge about android and all my experience this is how i would approach native android nowadays and how i would relearn these concepts so that is actually a very frequent question i get just if you know nothing about android how should you actually start and also if you're somewhere in the on the beginner level and you know a little bit then this video will also help the first thing is most people explicitly ask for a road map for android and here's my my view on that don't learn with road maps they will destroy you and while a lot of people might be surprised now why i have that view let me explain so many people want a roadmap because of course if you see that if you see images on google if you google for that if you if you just get a step-by-step tutorial step-by-step manual how you should approach a specific large topic like android then this seems super helpful because you you just need to follow the roadmap right you you first learn this then this then this then this and in the end you're you're a really good android developer right no that's not the case the big disadvantage of roadmaps is that they they don't encourage you to build projects but that is how you learn because they will even put you further in tutorial hell because you will just go through these topics one by one search for youtube tutorial learn that and once you finish that youtube playlist you will jump to the next topic watch another youtube playlist then to the next youtube playlist and so on and so forth you don't build projects with these topics and just because you know a bunch of topics of android development like navigation component retrofit room if you have applied all these in a single activity maybe in a single app just to to learn these concepts themselves that doesn't make you an android developer you have no idea how to combine all that in a really functional app and an app is in the end why you're doing all this right you want to build apps you want to build cool things that are actually helpful to people you want to publish something on google play and get downloads you want to earn some money as an android developer that is what you want but for all of that you actually need to build solid projects so that should be the focus and not learning one topic then another topic another topic step by step just the the theoretical part of that maybe implement it very roughly in practice in a single activity but you want to be able to put all of that together into any kind of app you want to be able to build and build it so here is my suggestion how i would approach this for sure at the as the very first few topics you need to learn these without building projects because you just don't know anything about android so what any native android developer nowadays should learn first is kotlin be sure that you know how to use kotlin at least the basics everything i teach in my kotlin ub2 pro playlist is fully sufficient number two is learn the android basics i teach that in my android fundamentals playlist so you want to learn what is an activity what is a fragment what is a service broadcast how can i execute something in the background very roughly um you don't need to be an expert in a lot of these fields you don't need to know all of that in detail just having a rough understanding of what the android framework consists of and when you should use these things and then we're already at the point where i recommend to not further learn topics just by themselves without including them in a project so now i'm going to tell you some topics that are just important for any android developer out there you need to know these this is also what a roadmap would tell you but i tell you don't learn these just with a single single video so you you really want to learn these by building a project that immediately tells you and that immediately helps you to learn when and how you should apply this in practice because there is a huge difference between just knowing when to apply something in theory and actually doing that in practice that's a huge difference if you know okay that is when i need to use post requests in retrofit that is when i need to pass navigation arguments so what i suggest you pick one to two topics per project that are new to you and that you learn with that project let's say you want to learn retrofit that is something every android developer should note how to make http requests so you think about okay what actually what kind of project could i build with that you could for example take a look for free apis out there that don't need any authentication and just use this and just implement such an api in your app so just for example just getting data and displaying that in a list maybe have some kind of detail view but but that is already it you don't need to build a crazy project here the important thing is that you actually implement that in a somehow useful project so as i said the first feature could be retrofit and curtains for example so you you build a project and the the full focus lies on learning retrofit and curtains because these are kind of strongly coupled together so i will learn these two together but that is pretty much it you you don't touch any other topics like databases and stuff like that no you only learn retrofit and curtains with that project and after you build that product by the way um you build it so you don't follow a tutorial for that you can follow the tutorial before that to learn it but before you jump to the next feature you need to build your own project so you need to do something without tutorial after that you can for example include a database so then the next topic you would learn is room which is a database framework for android so you could either just build for example a simple node app that that just saves notes in a local database or you could simply extend your existing app that you made with retrofit and you extend that with a database for example you had some offline caching or so and learn about that and again you just focus on the single feature of the single new feature which is implementing a database and you you build another project with that and you also don't really need to care about any type of architecture when you're a beginner for your first project just be sure that your app does what it what it's supposed to be if it doesn't survive screen rotations don't really care as a beginner you can learn all of these things later so next step could for example be dependency injection so you again take another project and in that project you you start to inject your dependencies and you learn about that again in a new project so you build a lot of projects because that's the only way you will get better as an android developer whatever job you're looking for whatever type of freelancing you want to do as an android developer you will need to build projects and you will need to build solid project that's really the number one skill you need if you don't know how to build an app then you're pretty much worthless on the job market so really do that build projects build projects as many as you can and just learn one topic at a time per project maybe two broad maybe two topics if they kind of belong together like uh curtin's retrofit curtin's room and stuff like that something that's important for any android developer would be image loading so using an image loading library like glide picasso coil i'm just picking one of these learning that um mvvm is of course super important but i would i would wait with that until you know at least room retrofit and dependency injection because mvvm fully builds upon upon these concepts so yeah it's actually nothing i would learn at the very first step and as i said watching tutorials is fine as long as you also build something alone after that tutorial because the tutorial shows you hey this is how you can do that this is how you can apply it in practice if it's a good tutorial and then you know that at least in theory how to apply it in practice and you need to do that in your own project because otherwise you haven't learned it because just watching a tutorial is helpful so you know what mistakes maybe to avoid and how to structure specific things but it doesn't um you don't really learn implementing that on your own you only learn that by actually doing that by implementing on your own and that is already it for this video so summary first learn kotlin then learn android fundamentals and then build projects then build useful things even if they are super simple build these on your own maybe watch your tutorial first if you need it um if you watch some please watch mine but apart from that then you also need to build your own project that's the key message of this video and i hope you got that and i hope you will also follow it and by the way if you're looking for text written content by me so even more content which is of course free apart from instagram and youtube then check the link down below you can subscribe to my new email newsletter and you will get regular android and kotlin tips right into your inbox so thanks for watching and i wish you an excellent day and i'll see you back in the next video

Channel: Philipp Lackner

Views: 14,016

Keywords: android, tutorial, philip, philipp, filipp, filip, fillip, fillipp, phillipp, phillip, lackener, leckener, leckner, lackner, kotlin, mobile

Id: LBryDhN8BOw

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021