Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By : John Horton, Paresh Mayani
Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By: John Horton, Paresh Mayani

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular OS in the world. There are millions of devices accessing tens of thousands of applications. It is many people's entry point into the world of technology; it is an operating system for everyone. Despite this, the entry-fee to actually make Android applications is usually a computer science degree, or five years’ worth of Java experience. Android Programming for Beginners will be your companion to create Android applications from scratch—whether you’re looking to start your programming career, make an application for work, be reintroduced to mobile development, or are just looking to program for fun. We will introduce you to all the fundamental concepts of programming in an Android context, from the Java basics to working with the Android API. All examples are created from within Android Studio, the official Android development environment that helps supercharge your application development process. After this crash-course, we’ll dive deeper into Android programming and you’ll learn how to create applications with a professional-standard UI through fragments, make location-aware apps with Google Maps integration, and store your user’s data with SQLite. In addition, you’ll see how to make your apps multilingual, capture images from a device’s camera, and work with graphics, sound, and animations too. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to start building your own custom applications in Android and Java.
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Android Programming for Beginners
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Lifecycle phases – what we need to do


When we are programming an app, how do we possibly interact with this complexity? The good news is that the Android code that was auto-generated when we created our first project does most of it for us. As we have discussed, we just don't see the methods that handle this, but we do have the opportunity to override them and add our own code to that phase.

This means we can get on with learning Java and making Android apps until we come to one of the few instances for which we need to do something, specifically in one of the phases.

Tip

Each Activity has its own lifecycle

Actually, this discussion is relevant to just an Activity. So, if our app has more than one Activity, they will each have their own lifecycle. This doesn't have to complicate things, and in the long run it will make things easier for us.

Here is a quick explanation of the methods provided by Android, for our convenience, to manage the lifecycle phases. To clarify our discussion of lifecycle...