Android: Popular Mobile Operating System

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Introduction
To first introduce the topic, Android is an incredibly popular mobile operating system. In recent years it has gained a huge following and a person can find Android enabled phones and tablets everywhere. According to Kerr (2013), as of November 2013 Android devices are currently dominating the smart phone market at about 80% of all smart phones being an Android device. Personally, I currently use a Droid Razr which is outfitted with Android Jelly Bean (Android 4.1), which is not the newest Android release, but it is among the most popular at this time. I also previously owned a Droid 1, which is what really put me on the Android path. While my usage of Android products doesn’t account for much market share, I am still a firm believer in Android, and the numbers really show that many more people are similarly minded. As Android’s popularity increasingly grows though, it comes to a point where to be effective as a programmer in a mobile market; you have to learn the Android ropes. The ropes for Android programming start in Java programming, which makes the transition quite easy for most programmers as Java is still a very popular language. This brings up a few questions though. Now that I know where to start, where is this path going to go and how is it different than normal Java? Are there many challenges in this transition from JRE to Android?

Java Programming Introduction
Java itself is a very powerful and flexible programming language. It has many features which make it a fantastic choice for programming. Some of the features include, but are not limited to:
1. Portability – the code is compiled and run in a specific environment, not an operating system
2. No pointer arithmetic
3. Garbage collection...

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...ster based processing requires fewer instructions, but the tradeoff is that these register instructions must be longer. The benefit from using register based processing is the fact that Android applications need less memory to execute efficiently. This is especially useful due to the compressed environment it must work with.
It is highly useful to learn the specifics of programming in standard Java and where it compares to Android based Java. This is especially true if a programmer wants to delve into the mobile world. Realistically it would not be a difficult transition either, learning to program Android applications would essentially be an extension to learning Java. The only reason I bring it up to learn Android was also stated in the introduction. Android is an incredibly popular mobile operating system. Not only that, but it is incredibly successful.

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