The International Student Blog

As mobile development becomes an increasingly viable and accessible field for individuals with knowledge of programming languages, students of computer science—international students included—continue to try their hands at the potentially highly lucrative endeavor of developing applications for mobile devices.

Development for Android has surpassed mobile development for any other platform, including Apple’s iOS. The continued popularity of Android development amongst mobile platforms is, in part, due to the accessibility of the Android SDK (software development kit), the reliance of Android development on the universally-known programming languages of HTML, Java/JavaScript, C, C++, and the ability to freely upload to the Android marketplace. This combination means that any international student with programming knowledge can download the required software to try their hand at creating an Android application, subsequently upload it for free to the Android marketplace, and potentially turn a profit while gaining freelance programming experience.

Contrast that process with mobile development for devices that run on Apple or Palm-based operating systems. IOS development takes place within a heavily-regulated infrastructure, wherein it is free to create programs, but it requires a developer’s license (attainable for an annual fee of $99) to release applications to the Apple marketplace. Moreover, once released for iOS, Apple retains 30 percent of revenue generated by sales of the application. Development for Palm-based devices employs dated programming languages for devices with significantly less market penetration than their Android or Apple-based counterparts. Therefore, there is less incentive for mobile development on these platforms than exists for Android development.

The combination of being based on prominent programming languages, open infrastructure, and low-overhead regarding the acquisition of required software makes Android development the most popular platform for mobile development.

Mobile development represents a great way for international students hoping to apply information gained from studying mobile development to test their programming skills to gain freelance programming experience and, perhaps, turn a profit in the process.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 7th, 2013 at 6:06 am and is filed under International Student, International Student Study Section, Study in the USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Written by Jenny Frankel

Jennifer is the Director of Financial Services at Envisage International. Jennifer is a graduate of the University of Florida where she holds a Masters in International Business and a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration. She has lived and worked abroad in Chile, Costa Rica and London, and traveled extensively in South America, Europe and Asia.

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