Are There Any Similarities Between Android Development And Web Development?

For a long time, I have wondered how android phones work, with all the apps, background activities and all. I am not an android developer, so I took a short course on android development using Kotlin (a programming language) and a bit of what goes into developing android software solutions. I learnt that the basic building block of an android application is an "activity". Activity is to Android as a cell is to biology and an element is to chemistry. Simply put, when you click an application eg. LinkedIn Android application, the first thing you see on your screen is an activity.

To put it in more relatable terms, imagine browsing on the web, the process of navigating from one page to another on the web is similar to what is done on an Android app, in an android application we don't call it a webpage, we call it an activity instead. When you move from one thing to another in an android application, you're in essence moving from one activity to another. In web development, we use links/routing parameters to help a page link to another page such that when you link a link, you're able to move to a different page.

In Android development, we don't use "intent" to navigate from one activity to another. By now you're starting to notice that there isn't much difference between web development and android development, they're basically different names for the same type of thing. We have web pages for websites and we have activities for Android apps, we have links/routing parameters for websites and intents for android apps to navigate from one part of the software solution to another. This is why many believe that if you can learn one programming language, you can learn others.

The way code is written for android development is somewhat different from the way code is written for web development, the syntaxes are different, however, the concepts are fundamentally the same regardless. The bundling of resources in android development is somewhat different also. Android IDEs like Android Studio comes with a lot of icons that you can easily import into a project while the average web developer relies on font awesome icon and Bootstrap. Media query and responsive design aren't as tedious in android development but all in all, Android development and Web development are two sides of the same coin.