The best thing for a newbie Android developer is to start a really simple project, or take a demo project and extend it. But the most important thing is to get the things done, in other words, your main objective should be to finish the idea you have been working on.
We would like to share the time spent in the development of some android applications., in the last months we have had development sprints releasing two games, one app, a chrome extension and some huge improvements in our already released apps. Once you have some experience with Android it is not very difficult to start a project from scratch.
We developed Poke the droid, a simple game similar to Whac-a-mole that test your reaction times. The main motivation was to develop our first game, assuming it will not get the success of other popular games out there. It was developed from scratch in around 2 weeks.
Recently we released Super Stacker, the popular stacker game with some improvements like bonus, levels, etc. We began with Snake demo code as the base so it was not really difficult to be developed (one week), moreover we reused almost all the score system and UI from Poke the droid.
Another simple app we created is Spell Checker, this is a extremely simple application that check your words against Google system. We test the integration in a WebView of a remote web page with the Android system. It was a day of development, thanks to the Javascript library of GoogieSpell.
On the other hand, we have made a huge refactoring in our RSS reader Any RSS reader + widget (1.99 EUR). We have add the feature to open as an application, so you can access your saved feeds from the widget and from the app. It is #11 in the Top Paid of the News and Weather category, this fact has multiplied x2 the number of purchases per day.
Finally, one of us in a boring day developed a simple extension for Chrome called Android Market Link Converter, that converts links like market://search?q=pname:com.androidsx.anyrss into links to the most known Android Market clients (Cyrket, Bubiloop, etc.).
Now, we would like to make use of the Android Cloud to Device Messaging Framework, but at the moment we don’t really have any interesting idea 
Do you have some fast development experiences? Share with us!
I just wanted to say that I find your blog very useful. I am a beginning Android developer with one (simple) app on the market.
Keep the great stuff coming!
Congratulations! You have just won a new blog reader
.. really cool article, Mike.
I too have just started on an android app (actually my first every app for anything outside uni really) and love your articles =]
Was wondering maybe if you can post something about the revenue that you made with your very first ad-supported/paid app? And how fast your user base grew and what not? Would be great to compare for someone like me with no experience what so ever!
We’ve just launched a service that helps Android developers monetize apps, thought it might be useful – http://www.metaflow.com/news/2010/07/06/metaflow-gets-down-android
mobile advertising would be the trend in the next few years because of the growth of mobile users.’”*
From your twitter feeds it seems your having issues with mobclix. can you explain?
We are having serious issues with Mobclix that sooner or later will make a detailed post:
- We have not get any $ since 4 months or so.
- There were changes in the revenue per day of the previous days and no official announce. It was not few bucks, it was half of the revenue of 15 days.
And some other minor things we will write about.