Hi everyone, after a few weeks of missing development articles, I will try to come back on track with them. Today I am going to explain what the Android Manifest xml file is, why it is included in every android application and how to use it.

Every application must have an AndroidManifest.xml file (with precisely that name) in its root directory. The manifest presents essential information about the application to the Android system, information the system must have before it can run any of the application's code.

The Android Manifest includes information about the permissions used by the app (remember those permissions you accept when installing an app from the android market, this is where they are input by the developer), supported screens (small, medium, large, xlarge), activities used in the app (translation for these would be "windows" for a Microsoft Windows user, but more on these in one of the future articles) etc.

I thought I'd show you how to create your first Android App in this week's Android Dev Article. If you ever studied software development, by now you'd be bored of starting off by creating a "Hello World!" application, but this is the ultimate software development cliché so I wanted to share with you guys how you could create such an app for your Android device...

Now the problem with this is, I can create a tutorial for this myself, but the guys at Google have already set up an amazing Android Development resource website they constantly update and share new technologies and standards for development so I will share the tutorial from this website for creating the "Hello World" app. You can find it here.

Welcome to the first of many Android Development Articles. I will kick off with a tutorial for setting up your Android Dev Environment and will try to post new and interesting content each week. This will hopefully start up some interest in you guys to come up with different ideas for new applications that are missing on the Android Market and maybe we could organise an AMNZ team and work on some of them together in our spare time.

So... moving on to setting up the environment. This is what you need:

2,363 mobile web developers have taken part in a survey hosted by ICS (market research) and Appcelerator (web development) on the subject of mobile development. The survey really emphasises that this is a two horse race between Android and Apple iOS (nothing new here). It's clear that Apple iOS currently has the lions share of development but the survey also showed that developers believe that Android development is the future. The majority of developers (59%) believe that Android has the best long-term outlook. So as with all trends relating to Android we could soon be seeing a shift in development to favour our beloved Droid. Check out the pics from the survey below.