When it comes to App development it is a totally different ball game than website development. While encountering with numerous projects over a period of 7 years we noticed Android XML development is tricky and sometimes it becomes problematic to many developers and we understand why.
Problem with Android
It is open source, which is good in terms of development progress, good community to help but there are lot of hurdles-
- Device compatibility: Most of the device manufacturer companies like — Samsung, Xiaomi, Asus, HTC, manipulate and override default Android OS, it becomes a troublesome task sometimes to support an app for all devices
- OS compatibility: All devices don’t get OS upgrade as a result the app must support various OS versions.
- Resource compatibility: Different devices takes different resources, testing of resources on different devices becomes a must to ensure images, icons are good across all devices.
- Designing for tablets: Google play supports the apps which are tablet compatible separately in PlayStore. Designing an app which is compatible with both phone and android matters a lot, especially if they are designed in different way.
Why a front-end developer?
A front-end developer always works with two types of teams/people. UX-UI team and on another hand backend/app developers. While working in that junction they get to know the troubles, methods and tricks of both parties.
A good frontend developer do have an eye for details of design and the capability to implement it in best way which will also help app developers to work on that xml design without any headache.
Animation or interactions are huge part of app design. While developing XML, imitating the proper animation, shadows are necessary to ensure proper user experience throughout the app.
Proper reflection of the PSD design in the app is a must. Each shadow, fonts, spacing, margins, etc creates a huge impact on how a user uses an app.
Being a design driven development company, we get a lot of requests to convert app screens into XML, and after involving our frontend dev brigade we saw a huge spike in client satisfaction.