Recently I have begun the development of FHU Mobile for Android. At first it seemed rather daunting, and while there is a definite difference in building web applications and native application, Google has given developers all the tools they need to build responsive, powerful applications that take advantage of the mobile state of an Android device.
After consulting the Android documentation, I was able to figure out just how to get everything up and running. The Android uses Java, so as far as I know, any Java-based IDE will work to develop Android apps. The developer's guide suggests using Eclipse, so that's what I went with. In the past I have used both Eclipse and Netbeans as development environments, but I must say I feel most at home with Visual Studio. First let me say that in my humble opinion, when it comes to IDEs, Visual Studio is second to none. Microsoft has developed a very intuitive (Microsoft?) powerful program that almost makes me feel as if it teaches me to code as a code. In the little time I have had with Eclipse I must say that it does offer most of the "perks" of Visual Studio, such as good error checking and an intelligent auto-correct, however it isn't as fluid as VS. Eclipse runs slow on my machine, whereas Visual Studio is rather snappy, even on my 2008 Macbook (Windows 7). Visual Studio's Intellisense shines even more after using Eclipse, in which its auto-prediction is rather slow and not that smart.
As mentioned earlier Android apps are written in Java which is particularly awesome because it allows you to use most any of the large number of java libraries floating around on the internet. With that mentioned the actual logical coding of the applications are very similar to any other language I have used. It is the view-based components, and how the different methods work that have caused the biggest challenge to me. I am slowly learning my way around the Android framework and I believe I will continue to enjoy this challenge.