Hello world ... and then ?

After finishing a few tutorials at the official Android development site and reading through some of their guides, I have the feeling that building any app is possible but intimidating.

For even the very simple app that I have in mind, it seems as if I'll need to understand and set up several components:

running a separate background process,
opening and sending data to other activities,
receiving broadcast messages,
storing data,
etc ...

and on and on.  I'm not sure what I should try to tackle first, but I will post updates, if I ever make any progress.