It denpends on what exactly you are after and how much experience you have in building Android Apps.
The simplest solution - apart from using Tinker - may be using Blynk.
Everybody is learning differently, but in my experience, following step-by-step tutorials doesn't always help actually getting things to stick in my mind. The stuff that I find out myself is usually the stuff I will remember the best.
e.g. I had virtually no experience in developing an Android App, so I just took the Tinker App source code, ploughed through it, located the places where I thought things must happen, read through the code to get a feeling for what they did there and why, and that allowed me to extend the Tinker App in a way that suited my desires better
However, the Android SDK repository does now fearture a simpler template app to start off of.