Chapter 1. The Anatomy of an Android App

We live in an age where technologies are being developed and have become more and more accessible than ever before. The rise of the mobile computing platform has taken the technology evolution to a new high. The phones and tablets are getting smarter day by day and becoming the alternatives to a traditional PC. In this fiercely competitive world of mobile computing, every traditional PC manufacturers to small start-ups are in the race brining the devices of various form factors.

In this book, we will show you how to take advantage of your existing C# skills to write applications that run on Android powered devices. While most of this book will be focused on learning how to develop Android apps using C# and Xamarin.Android, we will start with a more general discussion of Android. What is Android? How does Android facilitate the task of creating great mobile apps? This chapter will help you answer these questions by providing a base-level understanding of the following topics:

• An overview of the Android platform
• Android platform versions and feature releases
• Android applications (building blocks)