Similarly, if you’re born at the tail end of Millenial/start of Gen Z, then you still grew up with a collage of 90s and 00s culture and inconography, offsetting the definitions the groups typically gain over time. Some Gen Z grew up into adolescence without really feeling the advent of the modern internet or social media. The end of that range never knew a world without it.

Generations are useful statistical groupings, but don’t represent individual experiences or influences, leading to disparity or outliers that feel excluded from their “peers” so to speak. I’d say I probably share more experiences with Gen Z, but a lot of the cultural aspects of my childhood are closely linked to later Millenial ones. There’s a gradient, not a cutoff.

As far as I’m aware, Samsung or Amazon are the only other real app “marketplaces”. Most developers using Fdroid otherwise rely on donations or patreon for active development, depending on the nature of the app

When people refer to a particular piece of development aoftware as closed or open source, they are referring to the license/availability of that software’s code. You can use proprietary software to produce open source code, which is the case with Android Studio. The code that makes up Android Studio is not open source, but your own work made within it can be.

In general, “open source” is a broad term that just means “can I see the code that made this?”. There are differing degrees of open source software as well. The MIT license, for example, opens up code to some modification/re-use but protects some libraries. Something like a BSD or GPL license is far less restrictive, usually allowing free modification and use of the code. Android Studio falls under the Apache license, one of the more restrictive licenses that still applies copyright, and may employ proprietary libraries that cannot be modified or copied for use. Again, this ultimately isn’t likely to affect your own work or projects, but it does mean there’s less transparency about the tools you are using to make it.

I apologise if this is overwhelming, but the distinction is important, and I think that as a beginner it makes sense to start with where there is the most documentation and ease of entry. Once done, it’s definitely easier to move towards projects that more closely align with FOSS philosophies.

Android Studio is just the work environment for code and app development. You could continue on to publish all your code/work as an open source application through whichever means you choose during or after the fact.

Imo that’s fine. It’s also still the best tool for learning since it’s the most widely supported one, and contains the greatest amount of documentation for working with android development. It costs nothing to use, and doesn’t lock you into any kind of ecosystem you can’t later migrate from.

Android Studio is the primary toolkit for developing native android apps. If you have no background in programming, there are some more visual tools like Budibase (open source) or Softr (closed source), but you are likely to run into difficulty getting them to apply logic the way you’d like.

If you’re a tinkerer, then honestly I’d look into learning more about Android Studio and Kotlin, the language most used these days for app development on Android.