When it comes to mobile development and specifically Android there are many developer tools out there, starting from the official Android Studio (which uses Java the official development language for Android) to more or less cross-platform solutions like Xamarin (with C#), NativeScript, Smartface, TabrisJS, React Native (all of these make use of JavaScript language).
There are also different development approaches when it comes to development, like hybrid(using Cordova) or native(using C/C++ or Java).
B4A is a simple to use and powerful RAD (Rapid Application Development) from Anywhere Software, capable of building completely native Android applications. It is easy to grasp for beginners and fully loaded with a lot of features necessary for experienced developers. It uses a Basic (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) dialect similar to Visual Basic (VB6, VB.Net).
Combined with B4i (which is another RAD tool from Anywhere Software) you can share most of the logic code between Android and iOS projects.
B4A it is used the thousands of developers all around the world for small inhouse applications to real world commercial applications.
B4X is a suite of simple, powerful and modern development tools from Anywhere Software and it consists from: B4A, B4J, B4i, B4R.
In this guide our main focus will be B4A but, we are also going to refer to B4i and B4J.
B4A development tool is available only for Windows. In order to use it, you will need a PC running Windows (I recommend Window 7) with at least 2Gb of RAM.
You can test your app on either an emulator (a virtual device running on your PC) or a real device. We recommend you have a real device available as it usually takes less time to install your app there than on an emulator and apps running there usually execute faster.
If you use a real device it should be running Android 1.6 or above (that is Android 2.x, 3.x etc.).