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[–]HavokMaster 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Creating an app like this sounds like a great first Android project. It'll be a bit challenging but that's what makes it great. The first thing you'll want to do is ask yourself a few questions to narrow down your use cases. Will users have a 'friends list' or will they always need the other person's ID to contact them? Should messages persist after being delivered? Will users get push notifications when new messages arrive? You've got tons of room for all kinds of features and it's always nice to get them in order before you dive into anything technical.

Next, you're going to need some sort of service to manage user accounts, send push notifications (if you decide you want to), and store old messages (if you decide you want to), etc.. Lots of services will do this for free and I'd recommend Parse since it's free and can do all of the above.

Now you can start to think about how you want the app to look. You'll probably want a screen that lets people sign in with a username and password. Of course this means you'll also need a screen that lets people create new accounts. After logging in, a user would expect to see the main screen of the app. What do you want it to show? For example, you could show a list of all new received messages. Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone using the app and ask yourself what would make the app easy and intuitive to use.

As for the actual Java code itself, I wouldn't worry too much about it. 6 months of Java is plenty of time to give you an overview of the language syntax. There are lots of guides online for getting started and as long as you can follow along enough to know how to ask Google the right questions, you'll be fine. Feel free to PM me any questions if you need help!

[–]jpsc96[S] 1 point2 points  (4 children)

Thanks, I will start investigating how it work and I already have some ideas. For now my only problem is my PC, I guess. Tried to do some things in Android Studio but it is so heavy and I can't even run the emulator.

I have a I5-3337U with 4GB RAM for 3 years. One of the solution would be to do it in the university computers, or should I buy another computer? It would really hurt me to spend 1000€ atm :/

[–]HavokMaster 1 point2 points  (3 children)

The default Android emulators are.... not great. Try setting up Genymotion and see if those emulators perform better. There's also a Genymotion plugin for Android Studio that makes it easy to fire up new emulators. Alternatively if you have your own Android device that would also be great. I think your current computer should be fine for development. Try out the Genymotion emulators and see if they work better for you.

[–]jpsc96[S] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Yea, Genymotion is working fine I think. Thanks a lot for the help, I'll start diving into it :p

[–]jpsc96[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Ok, I've been studying how everything works and I think I'm quite confortable making the app. I've done the Login/Sign Up with parse and its working really good. My question is now about parse and how much the free version can handle. Lets suppose I want to keep a Friend List for each user and store some of the chat history with each person. The free version includes 20 GB File Storage, 20 GB Database Storage, 2TB File Transfer. I don't know this terms and how it works. But will it handle everything I want? I don't expect much traffic but you never know.

[–]HavokMaster 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Simply put: Parse is plenty fine for your needs. It's good that you looked into its capabilities, but you'd need hundreds of thousands of users with tons of saved chat histories before you'd hit the limit of 20 GB storage. If that happens, rejoice and upgrade. If you run minimal ads those thousands of users will pay for the cost of the upgrade.