Top 9 Android Apps and IDE for Java Coders and Programmers

Alex Marshall

9 years ago

Coding on an Android Tablet or Smartphone

Recently at IDRsolutions my colleagues have spent a lot of time traveling to different conferences such as Oracle Code One and DevFest. One of the complaints my colleagues have is the amount of luggage they have to carry, especially when they still want to work on code for our Java PDF Viewer and SDK, PDF to HTML5 converter and a Java ImageIO replacement.

Having previously written an article on the ‘The 10 Best Android Apps for Designers and Web Developers’ as I spend a lot of my time on the web development and designing side of things, it occurred to me that Android is an extremely powerful platform (and open source) and I would be sure to find useful Apps and IDE’s for Java Coders and Programmers.

So to help make things easier for them, and with my keen interest in technology and love of gadgets, I grabbed my trusty Android phone to see what I could find.

JavaIDEdroid

JavaIDEdroid is an IDE (integrated development environment) that can run on Android and allows you to natively create Android applications without the need to use the Android SDK on Mac, Windows or Linux. It comes equipped with an aapt tool, compiler for Java, dx tool, DexMerger tool, ApkBuilder, zipsigner-lib (this library also does the zipalign), SpongyCastle Library, BeanShell Interpreter and JavaRunner, which allows running of any binary Java command line applications (.jar file).

Java Editor

Java Editor is a very easy-to-use and simple Java editor. It’s limited in functionality but it can color the syntax nodes, attributes, properties, events and also supports auto-completion and search and replace. It can open default files with the extensions jav & java.

DroidEdit

DroidEdit is a text and source code editor (similar to Notepad++ on the PC) and is available for android tablets and phones. It is supported by android tablets with external keyboards like the Asus Transformer or those with third-party external keyboards, there is also support for Hackers Keyboard. It also supports a variety of languages like C, C++, C#, Java, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python, Ruby, Lua, LaTeX, and SQL.

There is also a premium version with SFTP/FTP, Dropbox, Drive and Box support (great if you are on the move), custom themes (for those that want to customize everything), external commands through SSH and root mode.

Dcoder

Dcoder is a mobile coding IDE that is designed to help you learn to programme. It supports over 30 programming languages, including Java, C, C++, Python, C#, PHP and Ruby. Dcoder has a Rich Text Editor which has syntax highlighting, some autocomplete features and undo/redo. It also comes with algorithm problems for you to solve, to help you learn.

Code Peeker Pro: Source Reader

Code Peeker Pro comes with syntax highlighting and allows you to look up snippets. Although not an editor, it is a useful code reader and has been selected to be part of the Google Play for Education program and is currently used in schools as a teaching aid. Code Peeker will open and highlight any supported code language like C/C++ (c, cc, CPP, h, hpp), C# (c-sharp, csharp, cs), CSS, Java, JavaScript (js, JScript), PHP, Python (py), Ruby (rails, ror), XML (XML, XAML, XSLT, HTML, XHTML), ActionScript 3 (as3), AppleScript, Cold Fusion, Delphi/Pascal, Diff/patch files, Erlang, Groovy, JavaFX (jfx), Perl (pl), PowerShell (ps), Sass, Scala, SQL, Terminal scripts (bash, shell, sh, RC, conf), Visual Basics (vb, vbnet) and Verilog & System Verilog (v, SV)

It can also mark where the important code is, comes with a built-in file browser (in case your phone doesn’t have one), supports internal and external SD card memory and also supports other file browsers (Dropbox, File Expert, FX, Astro File Manager, etc).

AIDE – Android IDE

AIDE is an integrated development environment (IDE) for developing real Android apps directly on your Android device. It comes with interactive coding lessons and step-by-step tutorials for app development and Java programming skills. You can visually design apps, write code with the editor which can do code completion, real-time error checking, refactoring, smart code navigation and more.

AIDE supports Java/Xml and the Android SDK, apps with C/C++ and the Android NDK as well as pure Java console applications. It is fully compatible with Dropbox and allows easy download of your code from your Dropbox and sync back your changes. It can also open Android Studio projects which follow the default folder structure. AIDE also supports Git for professional development.

Anacode IDE

Anacode is another IDE (integrated development environment) and source code editor that supports the languages Java, HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript and C/C++ and allows you to build and run from your android device.
You can also write and test HTML, JavaScript and CSS in the built-in or system browser, upload to FTP and support the Tasks list too.

Quoda Code Editor

Quoda is easy to use source code editor or IDE, similar to Notepad++, with support for SFTP/FTP(S) servers and cloud storage (Dropbox and Google Drive). Some of the features include syntax highlighting with themes, cross-session editing, code-completion, extended keyboard, downloading source code from URL, auto-encoding detection, brace matching, auto-indentation, line bookmarking, colour picker, HTML formatting and more. These features come at a premium though and you may have to pay extra for newer or additional features. There is support for the following programming languages which include: ActionScript, C, C++, C#, CSS, Haskell, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Lisp, Lua, Markdown, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, Visual Basic and XML.

Java N-IDE

Java N-IDE was created to help people learn Java. It is a lightweight IDE that only supports Java. However, it does come with an offline compiler, autocomplete and code formatter. It is an open-source IDE with more features currently being worked on.

Hopefully, this guide has given you some useful ideas of what editors and IDEs you can use if you are on the go and also gives you a bigger insight into what your Android phone/tablet can do in terms of coding/programming.

Do you use your Android Phone or Tablet in a similar way? Let us know what apps you use.

If you are interested in IDE articles take a look at:

We now have a series of articles on what is new in Java 9: