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Would porting a Windows application to Android be a good way to get started learning again? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 2 years ago by LeylaaLovee@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/android_dev@programming.dev

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I'm a very results oriented person. Doing shit for arbitrary numbers in class? Doesn't do anything for me, they're just numbers. However making something that I actually find useful will get me going. I used to take comp sci classes and know Java, even made a few shitty apps for class back in the day. However, I had a hard time sticking with it because we weren't really learning anything to make it immediately valuable. Could dick around in Php for weeks trying to build a website, but cannot focus for classes.

Anyways, my idea is to port PKHex, a popular open source Pokemon save editor. Someone made a port a few years ago, but it doesn't work with anything past Android 11, hasn't been updated in 2 years, and the dev expects you to build the app yourself. So making a new version for Android seems very interesting to me. Is it a good idea for a first 'big' project?

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[–] hdsrob@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I've always found building complete things to be the best way to learn (since you have to solve all of the problems for the entire app to finish), so IMO this would be a good project to learn on.

[–] testAccount@programming.dev 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

They could even fully rebuild it with Jetpack compose (possibly Kotlin even) instead. Will have to build from scratch and use the old codebase as a reference.

Tho be warned Jetpack Compose is not mature yet.

[–] LeylaaLovee@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I'm gonna ask a stupid question real quick. What happened to Java development on Android? I've heard Kotlin is pretty similar so I'm not worried about learning another language, but I'm curious if Kotlin is a requirement for Android development now.

Assuming I can still build an app the same way I did in school, what's the benefit to switching to Kotlin? Would the app be easier to maintain on Kotlin? Better performance? Like I said, perfectly okay with picking up a new language, just looking for the "why".

[–] balder1993@programming.dev 2 points 2 years ago

The reason is Google kept Android stuck on Java 6 syntax for so long that the community moved on. At the time, moving from Java to Kotlin was a huge deal and then Jetbrains made a good job in making the tools work flawlessly and with no performance penalties as everything is compiled to Java bytecode (besides the nice interoperability).

Now Java has been upgraded on Android but it was too late.

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