What do you need to develop a client-server application on Android?

Question

PHP

Good day, dear geeks. Now I will ask a question that is usually asked by schoolchildren. But I will start with an introduction in order to better explain what my task is, and what I have already done.
I am a self-taught web programmer. I have my own online game. Browser. Therefore, I write the server part in PHP, and the client part in JS; HTML + CSS layout; as a database I use MySQL. The server runs on Debian. Bundle of Nginx + Apache. All this is controlled by the ISPmanager panel. Browser games are good for their cross-platform. It doesn't matter what platform, the main thing is to have a browser at hand. However, there are also several drawbacks to this approach. One of them is the large amount of downloaded data when using the mobile Internet. This affects the page opening time. And if the traffic is limited or charged, then things are much worse. And in general, even with fast and unlimited Internet, many people use smartphones and prefer to play through developers' applications. Not even speaking about,
This is where I thought about writing my own application for Android, to play from it. I decided not to write a game from scratch, but in fact a mobile client that will contain the necessary resources for the game (images, text, sounds, markup) and only load data from the database from the network, the results of server calculations, etc.
Inspired by my idea, I ran to install the latest Android Studio. I install, configure, download the SDK and other needs (fortunately I figured it out a long time ago when I sewed my smart). I create a project with a ready-made activity (Blank Activity), I learn to write, I use lessons from sites. Oh, yes, I'm a cool Java programmer, I thought. But it was not there. I need to write an application similar to the VK application. Today I spent the whole day figuring out the standard Navigation Drawer Activity. And I realized that I still have months to learn to write on Android. And I swung at the client-server. I read a lot, I read the first chapter "Java Philosophy" by Bruce Eckel. Looked at the content. And I found almost nothing about the client-server. Or I didn't search well. But if I still have the opportunity to make friends with Java (more or less clear), but with XML, and even more so with a bunch of Java + XML, I can't find common ground! :(
So, actually a noob question : what do you advise me to do, having only knowledge of PHP and HTML (and everything attached to them). Is there any way I can get out of my situation? I know that you can write in C # under Unity, but I did not make friends with the Unity environment. Or will I have to put up with it and sit for a couple of months studying Java + XML?
I apologize for the huge amount of text.
Thanks in advance for your understanding and help.
Regards, Yuri.

Answer 1

https://cordova.apache.org/

Answer 2

I don't believe in html engines for android (webview is wildly slow) ... study better something cross-platform and write immediately for android and ios

Answer 3

phonegap.com
Application in 5 minutes on the knee html + js

Answer 4

Well, I will also stick my IMHO, it seems to me that among all, except for Cordova, this is the best option https://facebook.github.io/react-native/

Answer 5

I have the same problem as you PhoneGap uses html + js and I have a php site, I think how to solve this problem on androids