


Business Insider reported in March that Android revenues are expected to overtake iOS for the first time in 2017. While Android was once considered the "low-rent" district of app revenues, this has slowly been turning around.

Necessity: It's the mother of invention, after all.There are any number of reasons you'd want to create your own Android app, including: Then we'll extend this application with the ability to select from among multiple files, making it more of a "notepad." For this type of improvement, we'll need to dive into Java and Android Studio. We'll do this first in App Inventor and preview the results in an Android emulator.

In the sections below, we'll build a prototype version of a simple "scratchpad" application, which will store the text you type into it. You can accomplish some neat things with App Inventor, which will keep you busy until you can dig into Java and access all the powerful features of the Android platform. But MIT offers its "App Inventor," an online tool that allows you to build your app visually. Many of these target enterprise users (and come with an enterprise price tag). The other option is one of the point-and-click app builders on the market.
