The team at Gluon spend a lot of time focused on streamlining the developer experience for creating mobile and embedded apps in Java. One of our primary areas of focus continues to be on the most popular Java IDEs. Developers use their favourite IDE (NetBeans, IntelliJ, or Eclipse, most commonly) to write and maintain code, and to manage dependencies. Rather than asking developers to download yet another tool, Gluon instead chooses to offer developers the ability to build and deploy their application to mobile and embedded devices and appstores directly from within their IDE.
The current approach that we are taking at Gluon uses the GraalVM native-image AOT compiler. Gluon Substrate, our toolchain that enables this, uses GraalVM native-image under the hood, and generates native images for desktop, mobile and embedded. Although developers can use Gluon Substrate directly, we think most users will use an IDE and a plugin to leverage the functionality offered by Gluon Substrate.
Coming soon is a massive documentation and samples release, but as a starter you can already watch the screencast below that explains how to achieve this using Apache NetBeans 12.