Alternative Android development tool

Another alternative to development for Android (and iPhone) is the Titanium appcelerator. There is a free and open source version. I have not tried it, they claim native mobile, desktop and tablet apps. It uses a combination of HTML and Javascript but does not need a browser on android , rather, it accesses part of the browser directly, in particular, it accesses the rendering part of the browser (the part that draws the webpage). The browser renderer (used in Chrome, and iPhone) is WebKit. So titanium calls Webkit to display the interface without directly invoking any browser. Since WebKit understands javascript (and its libraries eg JQuery), and HTML, essentially you are programming using both languages.