Android & Kotlin
Android is an open-source, Linux-based OS, mainly developed by Google. It’s well-documented and, next to iOS, the most common operating system for mobile devices. The team decided to develop an Android App, as some existing experience could be extended and most members were Android-device users.
Kotlin is a fairly modern programming language inspired by Java. It is clean, carries fewer formalities and is therefore shorter than Java. In 2019 Google declared Kotlin the preferred language for Android.
As all team members were eager to expand their skill-set with a new programming language, the decision was made to ‘jump in at the deep end’ and fully develop the Android App in Kotlin.
Bluetooth Low Energy
As Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) allowed for both a broadcasting approach and client-server-communication, the decision to use BLE instead of the ‘classic’ Bluetooth standard was quickly made.
Common with all modern technologies and tech stacks, using a newer approach inherently comes with a smaller knowledge base, due to the limited amount of ‘users’. This frequently led to issues, as exemplary code was difficult to find, even though the basic Google documentation was quite extensive.
