Berlin, Jan. 9, 2012 - In 2011 publishers created $US 6.8 billion in application download revenues while app development revenues reached $US 20.5 billion. The development service became a mass market almost 3 times of the size of the application download market today.

The market for mobile application development services, including application creation, management, distribution and extension services, has reached $US 20.5 billion vs. $US 6.8 billion in app downloads in 2011. Thus the development market surpassed the content market by the factor of 3. 

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:

A recent report from Bluevia and Vision Mobile shows that the majority of mobile developers are developing for Android rather than iOS (Apple). The Developer Economics 2011 report shows 67% of developers code for Android which is up from 59% last year. iOS has made some gains jumping from 50% to 59%, but must settle for second place against the green machine. Windows Phone 7 dropped from 39% to 36%. Although Windows Phone 7 (WP7) lost ground it's set to up it's game at a later stage. 32% of developers are intending to start work on WP7 which came in behind Android which scored 35%. iOS was pushed to 4th place behind Chrome O/S in relation to development intentions. 

The research arm of the Department of Defense in the US, DARPA, are looking at developing full disk encryption for Android and iOS. The military and other government agencies obviously require a higher level of data integrity than your standard consumer. The US Military are already looking at commercial smartphones on the battlefield and have developed specific custom made mapping applications to aide a soldier in the field and improve more efficient target acquisition. DARPA have lodged a Request for Information (RFI) to get the ball rolling. "The primary purpose of this RFI is to discover new technologies and methods to support full disk and system encryption of the [commercial mobile devices] (specifically Apple and Android platforms) to include a pre-boot environment to load the operating system."

As Android rolls across the landscape flattening all in its path, manufacturers are left with a tough choice on how they can differentiate themselves in a very competitive market. So what to do, the hardware is very similar considering there are only a few leading processor chip providers such as ARM, Nvidia etc. That leaves software as the only alternative. Manufacturers are already heavily involved in creating an experience on Android that they believe is far better than the Google "vanilla" offering. HTC have HTC Sense (superior than all the competition), Samsung have TouchWiz and Motorola have Motoblur. The rumour mill is turning across the internet that Motorola are looking at developing their own Mobile O/S to separate themselves from the Android pack.

Google and Android have been criticised for what seems like an eternity about platform fragmentation. One of the biggest issues is having developers create applications that are not backwards compatible with previous versions of Android. So Google have launched a new static library which assists developers in using the "Fragments API". What this means is that developers can develop apps that can work across all iterations of Android. This is great news for those of us that are stuck on older versions of Android. Nothing worse than hearing about an app that you just can't take advantage of. Think about all the new applications that are being designed for Android 3.0 Honeycomb. These will now be made available to us plebs on Android 2.3 and below. Not only is this good news for consumers it's also good news for developers who will have the opportunity to make money across a broader Android population. 

Every now and then a very useful site comes along. Meet the Android Apps Maker which is a free site that allows you to create an Android app in minutes with no development knowledge required. There are 18 different category/templates ranging from RSS readers, quiz games, to video players (linked to your youtube account). Customisation is limited but it's a free app maker after all. When I say limited I mean you can choose an app icon but you can't use one of your own images should you be graphically inclined. How and why is this site providing free Android apps? They take advantage by placing adverts on your apps to earn revenue. Don't like the idea of adverts on your shiny new app? No problem, take the paid version which seems very reasonable.