Development environments for mobile and smartphone software development

Mobile developers, those who write code for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, usually use a multi-purpose language to create mobile apps. Common languages are Java, Kotlin, Swift, and C#. The difference between mobile development and something such as web and backend development is usually in the platform and tooling. Mobile developers often rely on an IDE to write and test their code. To recap from earlier in this chapter, IDEs provide all the software and tooling that a developer needs to write and test code on a platform. This is especially important for mobile developers as they’re usually writing code on a platform different to where the software will be deployed. In other words, a mobile developer creates a mobile application on their computer that will eventually need to be run, tested, and deployed to a mobile device. Let’s use the example of the Android Studio IDE to explain...