Admit it – you’re already spending half your day glued to your smartphone. So why not use it as a tool to learn to program? This is the first thing you’ll read when you open the Dcoder, Mobile Coding Platform. This super interesting tool helps you learn to program in different languages based on a series of challenges that have you writing code right from your device.

To be clear, though: the app doesn’t teach you from zero. Before you start programming you’ll need to get your feet wet with basic programming techniques and algorithms, which will serve you well when you go to apply them to a specific language you want to learn. Clearly, though, despite having to hit the books for a good few hours to learn the theory basics, the best way to get the hang of anything is to practice it – and that’s where Dcoder comes in.

Inside the app you’ll work in a complete code editor that can detect the syntax of lots of programming languages: Java, C++, C#, PHP, Ruby, Python, and Objetive-C. Before you start mindlessly grinding out code (and even compiling and running your programs), you can take on the huge list of problems in Dcoder that serve as a quiz to test your chops.

The challenges are categorized by difficulty, and each proposes a statement along with a fixed list of input and output parameters. Starting with a ‘Hello World!’ program, you have to develop an algorithm till you work out the solution. The interesting thing is that the program itself detects whether your solution is correct after compiling and running it, giving you a score in an attempt to gamify the learning process. From the app you can access a leaderboard showing the highest scores of all users worldwide.

Decoder, Mobile Coding Platform is a great app if, as mentioned above, you want to get more out of your Android as your sole companion throughout long chunks of your day. If you want to learn to program in a certain language the app offers one more way to develop and reinforce your knowledge.