Is it possible to code Java using only an android phone?

[justagirl]

Hi, full disclosure I am still a student but I started to do tutorials on Java and it feels good. The problem is my desktop computer isn’t very useful as most days we have to deal with rotational power schedules. 

 

I have what I felt is a good phone, Samsung Galaxy A03 core 32GB phone. I saved up for it for about two years and finally got it as it was on sale. I like my phone it has good size memory good enough ram and a GPU. I play a lot of games on it but nothing heavy I know it isn’t a true gaming phone. 

 

I also have a Bluetooth keyboard for it and do a lot of my schoolwork on it. It really is a little powerhouse. 

 

But can I code on it? When I look for a Java IDE I get a mess of suggestions and mixed reviews. So I am hoping someone already did something like this and can give me a few pointers. I am looking into a TV box so that I can work on a full screen. The screen I have is a camping TV with HDMI, the resolution sucks but it can run on 12V and will run for many hours on a 40amp 12v car battery. Using an adapter I can get the android box to work as well. 

 

I know everyone here is screaming laptop but people are buying up those old laptops and refurbishing them to sell again at crazy prices essentially 15% off new ones. It is not nearly possible for me to get close to that. The biggest factor is are jobs. Normally I can find work but lately the it is hard because most people that finished school is occupying those jobs full time. The world is a bit harsh at the moment so I have to manage with whatever I have at hand.    

Edited January 6, 2023 by Spotty
fixed text colour

[Eigenvektor]

There are some Java editors/compilers that run on Android, e.g.

• AIDE
• Anacode
• Jvdroid

I haven't used any of them personally, so I can't really give a recommendation which one is best. It looks like they are limited to running apps directly on the device. So you'd likely have to export the code and compile it on your desktop, in case you need to provide binaries to your teachers.

 

Screen size and keyboard is probably the most limiting factor when writing code on a mobile device, but it looks like you've got that covered.

 

(Could you please edit your post and clear text formatting? Your text color is black on dark gray when using the forum's dark theme)

[jaslion]

Op do keep in mins that you bought a basic smartphone with limites specs. So coding wont be the smoothesr experience.

 

As for java ides the ones @Eigenvektorsuggested keep popping up and I personally used jvdrois before.

 

Didnt run smoothly on my then lg g5 and that phone is a lot faster than yours so do keep in mind youll need a decent chunk of patience

 

As far as I can see your phone doesnt support a wired display out so I do not know how you would acomplish this

[BiotechBen]

53 minutes ago, justagirl said:

 

Hi, full disclosure I am still a student but I started to do tutorials on Java and it feels good. The problem is my desktop computer isn’t very useful as most days we have to deal with rotational power schedules. 

 

I have what I felt is a good phone, Samsung Galaxy A03 core 32GB phone. I saved up for it for about two years and finally got it as it was on sale. I like my phone it has good size memory good enough ram and a GPU. I play a lot of games on it but nothing heavy I know it isn’t a true gaming phone. 

 

I also have a Bluetooth keyboard for it and do a lot of my schoolwork on it. It really is a little powerhouse. 

 

But can I code on it? When I look for a Java IDE I get a mess of suggestions and mixed reviews. So I am hoping someone already did something like this and can give me a few pointers. I am looking into a TV box so that I can work on a full screen. The screen I have is a camping TV with HDMI, the resolution sucks but it can run on 12V and will run for many hours on a 40amp 12v car battery. Using an adapter I can get the android box to work as well. 

 

I know everyone here is screaming laptop but people are buying up those old laptops and refurbishing them to sell again at crazy prices essentially 15% off new ones. It is not nearly possible for me to get close to that. The biggest factor is are jobs. Normally I can find work but lately the it is hard because most people that finished school is occupying those jobs full time. The world is a bit harsh at the moment so I have to manage with whatever I have at hand.     

 

You may run into an issue with the full screen if you are trying to do DEX, as your phone doesn't support it unfortunately, so it would need to be a wireless display.

 

As for compile: you may be able to compile on mobile, but I would expect a crash. The unisoc chip in the phone and 2gb of RAM would either cause a hard crash or would lead to extremely long compile times.

[justagirl]

1 hour ago, Eigenvektor said:

(Could you please edit your post and clear text formatting? Your text color is black on dark gray when using the forum's dark theme)

I am sorry I honestly didn't see that, For whatever reason Grammarly refuse to work on this page, so I edit it in a email and copy and paste it in. Didn't know there was a problem. really sorry about that.

[justagirl]

I might have a working laptop soon I am just doing repairs on it now. Got an SSD for it. Lets hope it solves its problem.

[Eigenvektor]

1 hour ago, justagirl said:

I am sorry I honestly didn't see that, For whatever reason Grammarly refuse to work on this page, so I edit it in a email and copy and paste it in. Didn't know there was a problem. really sorry about that.

No worries. I can select the text to make it readable. Just thought I'd point it out

 

1 hour ago, justagirl said:

I might have a working laptop soon I am just doing repairs on it now. Got an SSD for it. Lets hope it solves its problem.

Hope it works out, should be a lot easier to work with for development.

[Franck]

2 hours ago, justagirl said:

I might have a working laptop soon I am just doing repairs on it now. Got an SSD for it. Lets hope it solves its problem.

if it's an old enough laptop and your not that picky you could simply install a Linux distro with developer focus install if you want. It should be lighter on the system and is easier to setup properly than on windows for java.

 

I do specially favor Ubuntu for ease of use for java work. Install OS go in package manager and install Oracle JDK and IntelliJ or Eclipse for the IDE and your ready to go.

[wasab]

5 hours ago, justagirl said:

I have what I felt is a good phone, Samsung Galaxy A03 core 32GB phone. I saved up for it for about two years and finally got it as it was on sale. I like my phone it has good size memory good enough ram and a GPU. I play a lot of games on it but nothing heavy I know it isn’t a true gaming phone. 

that is the cheapest and lowerst tier phone offered by samsung. you can go ahead and literally buy a 5 year old flagship phone with snapdragon 845 for cheaper prices and aside from the battery, it will literally perform 10x better than your galaxy A03. In short your device is too slow to do anything other than phone call.

 

If you still wanna try it, there is termux which allow you to install all shorts of things, including a java compiler. it will compile your code into actual bytecode .class file and a jar like on the pc. 

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.termux/ (google play version is defunct)

https://www.crisisshelter.org/install-java-in-termux/

 

Heck, i even managed to install php, ssh server, and nginx on it, turning my phone into a webserver. Need to turn off the battery optimizer and turn on the wakelock for anything running in the background tho. 

[justagirl]

Right I got the laptop to work, I think mister Sebastian will be angry at me for not dropping the SSD. I actually got windows 10 working on it just fine. It runs fast enough it has good 8Gb of ram on it. it is running 10 Pro it is an i7 I will screen capture it later and post it. But before I do I just need to make sure it is mine first. It is only 120Gb but it is what I can afford. But all it needs to do is MS Office for school and Java so I don't think it will fill it up.

 

Screen shots on the way just need to get the final say. I also saw this Asus Vivobook W202 Celeron 4GB 64GB eMMC 11.6" Notebook Dark Blue for $174.43 US. I can save up for that and will be able to get it or something like it at the end of the year IF this person takes the HP back we will see.

[Guest]

On 1/5/2023 at 5:09 AM, Eigenvektor said:

There are some Java editors/compilers that run on Android, e.g.

• AIDE
• Anacode
• Jvdroid

I haven't used any of them personally, so I can't really give a recommendation which one is best. It looks like they are limited to running apps directly on the device. So you'd likely have to export the code and compile it on your desktop, in case you need to provide binaries to your teachers.

 

Screen size and keyboard is probably the most limiting factor when writing code on a mobile device, but it looks like you've got that covered.

 

(Could you please edit your post and clear text formatting? Your text color is black on dark gray when using the forum's dark theme)

IntelliJ is now considered the "best" but Eclipse is also good. 

 

53 minutes ago, justagirl said:

Right I got the laptop to work, I think mister Sebastian will be angry at me for not dropping the SSD. I actually got windows 10 working on it just fine. It runs fast enough it has good 8Gb of ram on it. it is running 10 Pro it is an i7 I will screen capture it later and post it. But before I do I just need to make sure it is mine first. It is only 120Gb but it is what I can afford. But all it needs to do is MS Office for school and Java so I don't think it will fill it up.

If you need more storage, I have like 7 Google Gmail accounts. Every Google account gets 15gb of free cloud storage. 

 

I wouldn't go hardcore creating things but if you want to keep class notes, is good. 

 

This should be more than enough for school what you have. Even if it's a "U" power efficient laptop grade i7. 

53 minutes ago, justagirl said:

Screen shots on the way just need to get the final say. I also saw this Asus Vivobook W202 Celeron 4GB 64GB eMMC 11.6" Notebook Dark Blue for $174.43 US. I can save up for that and will be able to get it or something like it at the end of the year IF this person takes the HP back we will see.

I would buy a used laptop on eBay. 

I recently aquired a Dell gaming laptop with a desktop grade i5, a 1050, 16gb ram, SSD & HDD for $300. 

It's a thousand times better than that. 

If you check locally, there are electric recycling centers in some countries. You might be able to search around for a free laptop or desktop that is being recycled.

 

Could be worth it since you seem really strapped for cash. 

 

As for your op, I can't read it, but I reported it so a moderator can fix the formatting for you. 

[Eigenvektor]

22 minutes ago, fpo said:

IntelliJ is now considered the "best" but Eclipse is also good. 

We were talking about Java editors/compilers running on Android itself. As far as I'm aware neither IntelliJ nor Eclipse can run on an Android phone.

[Guest]

15 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

We were talking about Java editors/compilers running on Android itself. As far as I'm aware neither IntelliJ nor Eclipse can run on an Android phone.

Ah okay. I got confused reading about her windows laptop working. 

[MarcoSoftPr]

I would probably look into https://vscode.dev/ , it's not fully fleshed out compared to the desktop version, but should be good enough and is a very decent IDE.

You can open Github repos there, just git commit and push work from each device when you can: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/sourcecontrol/overview

 

I would look into taking advantage of free products if wanting to compile, like Azure for Students: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/offers/ms-azr-0170p/ and use the credits to run a VM with VS Code Server: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/vscode-server and compile and run my code there, quite a learning opportunity, other option is to use Github code spaces, run your code in a dev container there, look at developing in a codespace and setting up your repository: https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/developing-in-codespaces/developing-in-a-codespace , it's part of the free education pack: https://education.github.com/pack#offers

[Takumidesh]

1 hour ago, MarcoSoftPr said:

I would probably look into https://vscode.dev/ , it's not fully fleshed out compared to the desktop version, but should be good enough and is a very decent IDE.

You can open Github repos there, just git commit and push work from each device when you can: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/sourcecontrol/overview

 

I would look into taking advantage of free products if wanting to compile, like Azure for Students: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/offers/ms-azr-0170p/ and use the credits to run a VM with VS Code Server: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/vscode-server and compile and run my code there, quite a learning opportunity, other option is to use Github code spaces, run your code in a dev container there, look at developing in a codespace and setting up your repository: https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/developing-in-codespaces/developing-in-a-codespace , it's part of the free education pack: https://education.github.com/pack#offers

This is great advice as it is the thing that schools usually don't teach, but is very important in the real world.

[justagirl]

On 1/6/2023 at 7:34 PM, fpo said:

IntelliJ is now considered the "best" but Eclipse is also good. 

 

If you need more storage, I have like 7 Google Gmail accounts. Every Google account gets 15gb of free cloud storage. 

 

I wouldn't go hardcore creating things but if you want to keep class notes, is good. 

 

This should be more than enough for school what you have. Even if it's a "U" power efficient laptop grade i7. 

I would buy a used laptop on eBay. 

I recently aquired a Dell gaming laptop with a desktop grade i5, a 1050, 16gb ram, SSD & HDD for $300. 

It's a thousand times better than that. 

If you check locally, there are electric recycling centers in some countries. You might be able to search around for a free laptop or desktop that is being recycled.

 

Could be worth it since you seem really strapped for cash. 

 

As for your op, I can't read it, but I reported it so a moderator can fix the formatting for you. 

I am using IntelliJ yes.

[justagirl]

On 1/6/2023 at 7:58 PM, Eigenvektor said:

We were talking about Java editors/compilers running on Android itself. As far as I'm aware neither IntelliJ nor Eclipse can run on an Android phone.

I wish they would make it that it runs it is such a good piece of software. Running IntelliJ IDE on Android

[Eigenvektor]

13 minutes ago, justagirl said:

I wish they would make it that it runs it is such a good piece of software. Running IntelliJ IDE on Android

That would essentially require them to rewrite/port their whole UI to Android. The, presumably, very small number of people developing on smartphones isn't going to make that effort worthwhile.

[MarcoSoftPr]

5 hours ago, justagirl said:

I wish they would make it that it runs it is such a good piece of software. Running IntelliJ IDE on Android

Most of the money comes from professional developers and enterprise users, all of us usually have a decent machine with a good power source since our time costs more than the device (and UPS/power sources). It's only really students that have the issue, and in the last decade it's been nice that AWS/Azure/Google Cloud have either student packs or credits, so you can always do something remote..

 

Note as well, if you want to learn Oracle SQL (generally good for learning proper transaction management), a bit ago (not sure how long) they introduced a "always free" tier: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ that includes an Oracle DB, and also a low-tier VM (where you can also host/run your project if you want to do that).

 

 

[justagirl]

Well I may not need to code on my phone after all.

I made a mistake with the OS I thought it was Pro turns out it wasn't. But it works!!

 

 

 

[Franck]

57 minutes ago, justagirl said:

I made a mistake with the OS I thought it was Pro turns out it wasn't

The reality is very very few people need windows pro. You encounter pro in business world everywhere else it's pretty much useless.

[justagirl]

14 hours ago, Franck said:

The reality is very very few people need windows pro. You encounter pro in business world everywhere else it's pretty much useless.

I am also told that Pro is very heavy on a older system like this one. I might be wrong but I think it might be true.

[justagirl]

I got an Asus A541S. It had no charger but I had a universal charger so I set it to 19V and charged it up. It works but only has about 2Gb of ram with only one expansion slot according to the YouTube. But the ram is so old that I doubt I will find any to upgrade with. I then remembered I have Kali Linux. Now I think the 500Gb hdd is shot it makes a loud ticking noise. So end of this month I will get another 120Gb SSD and install it then load Kali Linux as its native OS. 

 

I know it is a tool I want to investigate. I got two TP Link routers that was given to me by our local store. The owner said he upgraded. I think I can setup a little lab to see how routers can be messed with. Also have a old 32bit laptop made by Samsung. But it has 2Gb of ram so I am thinking I can create a lab situation with a router and target laptop loaded with Linux Puppy 32Bt version. The goal is to see what the software and scripts do.

 

My question is, do I need to know JAVA or rather C+? If I want to build tools. I am getting good with Python now. I found a tutorial for a WatsApp bot and I want to build that to troll my friends with. I want to see if they will notice it is a bot and not me.

[Franck]

1 hour ago, justagirl said:

I am also told that Pro is very heavy on a older system like this one. I might be wrong but I think it might be true.

Home vs Pro is just more options. See it as more programs installed. Overall there is no impact at all and anyhow most of the extra option that Pro has are there but there is no UI or is locked to prevent the user to fiddle with. For example you cannot manage group policies on home easily but with programming you have access to change it but it's available to developer as they "should" know what they are doing more than a "home" user.

[justagirl]

6 hours ago, Franck said:

Home vs Pro is just more options. See it as more programs installed. Overall there is no impact at all and anyhow most of the extra option that Pro has are there but there is no UI or is locked to prevent the user to fiddle with. For example you cannot manage group policies on home easily but with programming you have access to change it but it's available to developer as they "should" know what they are doing more than a "home" user.

I recall trying to mess with those settings. I did the following it kinda worked.

 

Quote

How do I enable group policy in Windows 10 home?

 

 

Open the Local Group Policy Editor and then go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel. Double-click the Settings Page Visibility policy and then select Enabled.