The open source, cross-browser and cross-platform technology Android has encouraged Android app development in such a way that Android developers are now the much-sought after professionals in the realm of information and technology. It is being observed that Android phone market is growing leaps and bounds at about 32% rate as is evident from the huge sales of MotoBLUR, Motorola Droid, and some HTC models. A software development company prefers to offer Android-centric applications is because of its open source and flexible nature. Along with the IT companies, users too are attracted towards this flexible platform because of following reasons:

(1) It allows to send and receive data across varied mobile networks with the help of Bluetooth, EDGE,    GSM, CDMA, Wi-Fi, UMTS and EV-DO technologies
(2) Easy data storage with the help of SQLite
(3) IPC (Interprocess communication) message passing
(4) Exporting and signing an app for publishing
(5) Android app development using the features of touchscreen, video camera, accelerometer, magnetometer and GPS
(6) For 3D and 2D graphics, availability of all-inclusive libraries
(7) Google Talk usage for Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking
(8) Libraries with an extensive range for video, audio and image files

Now, talking about the business perspective, any software development company finds it cost-effective to work on Android app development. The reasons: it is an open source technology and therefore companies are not required to pay for costly tools to develop applications. Hence, companies need to invest only in: hiring expert and skilled Android app developers, proper infrastructure to develop and test Android App development and if the companies are using third party app stores for distribution, then they need to pay royalty fees. However, it is its being sans royalty and license that makes it popular for the IT companies. Also, apart from selling the applications through third party stores, Android developers can set up an exclusive network with which sales of Android centric applications can be promoted. And the promotion is quite easy because it is not a monopoly market that is in the control of a few. It is an open market and makes it easier to cash in on the applications when they are ready for the sale. Another feature of Android app development is its seamless integration and cross promotion of various applications. This helps a lot when a software company needs to develop a network between varied applications.

Apart from all these major features, Android app development can also be benefited by the rich set of C/C++ libraries used by various components of the Android system. The developers can access these libraries through Android application framework. Following are some major libraries that help Android developers build unique applications:

These capabilities are exposed to developers through the Android application framework. Some of the core libraries are:

(1) System C library
(2) Media Libraries
(3) Surface Manager
(4) LibWebCore
(5) SGL is consisted of 2D graphics engine
(6) 3D libraries is based on OpenGL ES 1.0 APIs; the libraries use either hardware 3D acceleration (where available) or, highly optimized 3D software rasterizer
(7) FreeType includes bitmap and vector font rendering
(8) SQLite is a powerful and lightweight relational database engine available to all applications

Source : Articles Base