'Mobile Application' industries are experiencing some of the latest trends and technologies these days, and Android is one of them. This is a mobile operating system by Google and has become a new wave in the smart phone application market as it is easily and freely available to the developers as an open-source platform. Due to its open environment feature, it has a large number of phone manufacturers and a variety of hand-held devices.

Android Application provides a very friendly Software Development Kit (SDK) which can be employed for the creation of android based mobile applications. It can update its SDK with every enhancement in the android OS. Also, programmers can write code for their own customized applications with the convenience of Google's OS SDK.

Android provides opportunities to every large and small IT solution provider, and today we have a number of mobile application development companies who offer their services at very reasonable price due to the cut-throat competition. But, ultimately, this competition has given additional advantages to the clients and the end-users. As a result, they are getting best of development options and services at affordable price and have consumer for the applications as well.

Companies that provide development services have a number of talented developers and programmers. This is created by hiring dedicated and professional android application developers.Having these developers with the companies, they offer clients to develop applications for them, either from on-site or off-site location. In on-site development services, companies send the developers to work from clients' office or location and in off-site development service, experts work from their own office in close coordination with the client side. It is also called as 'Outsourcing'.

Before choosing a development company, clients should look for the following benefits,

• The company should be an expert at android application development
• It should offer user interface designing as well
• It should possess experience of developing multiple android apps in various app categories
• It should display a perfect app designing capability across various android devices
• It must reduce the app development costs significantly as compared to others
• Apart from development, testing service should also be offered
• The app delivered after testing should extend a smooth user experience
• The app should be totally customized
• Source code security with non-disclosure agreement should also be signed
• If required, the company should be capable of marketing the app as well

If, a company offers all or majority of the above-mentioned benefits, clients may consider signing the contract with them. Although, companies do offer considerable benefits to clients as developing application on android is beneficial for them as well.

Advantages of Android platform

Android offers several benefits to the developers as follows:

• GSM, EDGE, CDMA, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, EV-DO and UMTS technologies to send or receive data across mobile networks
• A comprehensive library for 2D and 3D graphics is offered
• Wide range of libraries for image, audio and video files exists
• Features of a video camera, touch-screen, GPS, accelerometer and magnetometer are offered
• Inter-process communication (IPC) message passing is possible through android
• Other benefits may include:

1. P2P using Google Talk
2. SQLite for data-storage
3. Export and signing app for publishing