Making a 'App' for an Android Phone

[SteamyTea]

I want to make, what I think should be a simple app for my phone.

All I want it to do is take a picture every time I move a set distance, store the picture and attach the appropriate location to it.

How does one go about this.  I have looked at a few tutorials, but I think I am missing something very basic.

It would be nice if I could 'do the work' on my PC, rather than fiddle on the phone.

Anyone done this?

[MikeSharp01]

You need the android SDK, you can then work in JAVA, it is simple once you get your head around the way Android wants things done - page based is simplest but you can write background apps if you want. Where exactly are you stuck?

 

[SteamyTea]

10 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

Where exactly are you stuck?

Right at the very beginning.

I tried an online development package, got as far as giving it a title, then I could find nothing.  All it seemed to want to do was make a pretty GUI.

Is Android SDK a program that runs in Windows?

Never done any work in Java, I struggle with a bit of Python to be honest.

[MikeSharp01]

8 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

Never done any work in Java, I struggle with a bit of Python to be honest.

I think there is a blocky version you can use.

 

8 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

All it seemed to want to do was make a pretty GUI.

Bingo - that is the base case you create the GUI as you have to be able start / stop the app but once started you can leave it running on the phone or suspend it when the window is not visible - close it and it stops. 

 

 

[ToughButterCup]

@SteamyTea, HTML5, CSS3 and JQuery and a web server (free) will highly likely do the job. 

There's loads of excellent online help.

[SteamyTea]

I have downloaded and installed Andoid Studio, that seems to have SDK in it.

46 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

that is the base case you create the GUI as you have to be able start / stop the app

That makes sense, but how to I add in things like the camera, GPS and then, and this is probably the easy bit, make some code to do what I want it to do.

[TerryE]

If you've played around with NodeRED, you can get NodeRED for Android.

[joth]

 Before writing your own app, I'd first check no one already has. There's loads of apps to turn an old phone into a dashcam, most support motion activated recording so some might have the every N distance feature you need e.g.

https://www.howtogeek.com/270340/how-to-turn-an-old-smartphone-into-a-dash-cam-for-your-car/

 

If that wasn't satisfactory, then I'd look at workflow automation apps like Tasker and Locale, see if they have plugins for movement trigger and taking a photo

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twofortyfouram.locale&hl=en_GB

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm&hl=en_GB

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kanetik.movement_detection&hl=en_GB

 

If none of those work out, I'd start digging around in the Java/kotlin SDK.

 

[BMcN]

Have a go with the MIT app builder.

 

https://appinventor.mit.edu/

 

 

[Mally]

I’ve had to create an Android app for my masters. I used eclipse. Eclipse is a free professional interactive development environment. It has full debug capability and an android emulator. That means you can run your code and it launches a phone app on your computer screen For testing and interacting with. 
 

you can download eclipse here: https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/release/oxygen/1a/eclipse-ide-java-developers. 
 

developers tend to use github to (https://github.com/) store and share projects. From here you can download source code. It may be that you can find something close to your needs and modify it to your specification.