Question

I’m creating an Android application that essentially does nothing but adding ‘1’ to
numbers it would get from a database. After that write the new number to the database. However I’m kind of new to the whole Android thing and I can’t seem to find any solution on this site or any other for that matter. Basically I know that you can use two kinds of database connections in Android:
Create an SQLite database, and connect to that. Which wouldn’t be too hard, but the budget for the app is a simple 0$, so I can’t afford hosting a server, and free hosting services aren’t around for SQLite. And although the traffic is going to be extemely minimal (10 users tops) hosting it myself isn’t an option.

Now the second way would be, using a differenct database like MySQL and creating a webservice in PHP to interact with the application. However the same issue pops up but I got a site which allows free MySQL hosting and enables PHP features. However I can’t seem to figure out how the hell I could connect to this database or even go about creating a webservice in PHP (never done this before).

Also, isn’t there a simpler way to go about this problem? Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Based on our comment discussion and your indication of the app being small, I would suggest trying out Parse. It does require you to learn their API but it’s rather simple for the most part. They (for now) have a free account for minimal usage apps or dev testing.

My caution is that if you are doing this project to learn, then I would skip Parse as it hides a lot of what goes on in the details. But in any case, I think it could fulfill your requirements.