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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Frameworks
  5. Android SDK vs Play

Android SDK vs Play

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Android SDK
Android SDK
Stacks27.6K
Followers20.7K
Votes800
Play
Play
Stacks752
Followers609
Votes496
GitHub Stars12.6K
Forks4.1K

Android SDK vs Play: What are the differences?

Developers describe Android SDK as "An SDK that provides you the API libraries and developer tools necessary to build, test, and debug apps for Android". Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment. On the other hand, Play is detailed as "The High Velocity Web Framework For Java and Scala". Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.

Android SDK and Play belong to "Frameworks (Full Stack)" category of the tech stack.

"Android development", "Necessary for android" and "Android studio" are the key factors why developers consider Android SDK; whereas "Scala", "Web-friendly architecture" and "Built on akka" are the primary reasons why Play is favored.

Play is an open source tool with 11.2K GitHub stars and 3.77K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Play's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Android SDK has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1083 company stacks & 905 developers stacks; compared to Play, which is listed in 112 company stacks and 47 developer stacks.

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Advice on Android SDK, Play

beinoriusju
beinoriusju

Feb 25, 2022

Review

Whatever you do don't go WordPress path. Developers over-there tend to ignore system limitations and hardcode and overengineer their solutions so as to please their clients. If you are a beginner probably you'll get to work on someone else's shitty code and will be asked by your boss to do "yet another impossible thing with Wordpress". And... Probably... You'll do it.

My suggestion is: think in stacks and don't start too low. Starting with HTML, CSS3 and JavaScript is too low. Start on higher levels and with something practical. You'll have time for basics some time later and it would be much easier, because you'll see those technologies are compliment to what you do and not your main objective.

My suggestion for you:

  • Android Mobile App Development path (complex enough so you won't get bored)
  • All things web3 crypto, nft, virtual reality, blockchain path (has tons of computing web development tasks)
  • Cloud computing setup and administration path (good, because you say you're not good at programming)
  • Artificial intelligence and automation (this is future, people need this)

I've also found it helpful to think of each stack as a surface (find Google Images "radar chart") . Every time you try to learn something new you start in the center, with all technology-points overlapping. You are as low as you can get and you know nothing. Your job is to expand outwards each technology so as to make a stack-surace. The more surface the better. You'll see that some technological-aspects are easier to expand than others and plan your time accordingly.

Have a good start!

107k views107k
Comments
Omran
Omran

CTO & Co-founder at Bonton Connect

Jun 19, 2020

Needs adviceonKotlinKotlin

We actually initially wrote a lot of networking code in Kotlin but the complexities involved prompted us to try and compile NodeJS for Android and port over all the networking logic to Node and communicate with node over the Java Native Interface.

This turned out to be a great decision considering our battery usage fell by 40% and rate of development increased by a factor of 2.

622k views622k
Comments
Leonardo
Leonardo

Project manager and web developer at Revo Digital

Mar 22, 2021

Needs adviceonTypeScriptTypeScriptRailsRailsScalaScala

In the past few months, a project we're working on grew up quite fast. Since we're adding more and more features, I'm considering migrating my Express/TS REST API towards a more solid and more "enterprise-like" framework. Since I am experienced with TypeScript but not so much with Rails nor Play (Scala), I'd like to have some advice on which one could provide the best development experience, and most importantly, the smoothest paradigm transition from the JS/TS world. I've worked on some personal project with Rails, but I've found the Ruby language really distant from what the TypeScript ecosystem and syntax are, whereas on the opposite - during the brief tours I've taken in the past weeks - it's been a pleasure coding in Scala. Obviously, there are some key differences between the two languages - and the two frameworks consequently - but despite all the ROR automation and ease of use I don't despise at all Scala's pragmatic and great features such as static typing, pattern matching, and type inference. So... Please help me out with the choice! Regards

2.74M views2.74M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Android SDK
Android SDK
Play
Play

Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
12.6K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
4.1K
Stacks
27.6K
Stacks
752
Followers
20.7K
Followers
609
Votes
800
Votes
496
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 289
    Android development
  • 156
    Necessary for android
  • 128
    Android studio
  • 86
    Mobile framework
  • 82
    Backed by google
Pros
  • 81
    Scala
  • 55
    Web-friendly architecture
  • 55
    Built on akka
  • 50
    Stateless
  • 47
    High-scalable
Cons
  • 3
    Evolves fast, keep up with releases
  • 1
    Unnecessarily complicated
Integrations
Java
Java
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Android SDK, Play?

Node.js

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Rails

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Symfony

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix is a framework for building HTML5 apps, API backends and distributed systems. Written in Elixir, you get beautiful syntax, productive tooling and a fast runtime.

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