Book Image

Mastering Android Application Development

By : Antonio Pachon
Book Image

Mastering Android Application Development

By: Antonio Pachon

Overview of this book

There are millions of Android apps out there for people to download – how do you make sure yours has the edge? It’s not always about innovation and ideas – the most successful apps are those that are able to satisfy customer demands – they’re the ones that look the best, the fastest, and the easiest and most intuitive to use. This book shows you how to create Android applications that do precisely that – it has been designed help you consider and answer those questions throughout the development process, so you can create applications that stand out against the crowd. Learn how to create exemplary UIs that contribute to a satisfying user experience through the lens of Material Design, and explore how to harness the range of features within the Android SDK to help you. Dive deeper into complex programming concepts and discover how to leverage concurrency and navigate memory management and image handling. You’ll also find further guidance on testing and debugging so you can guarantee that your application is reliable and robust for users. Beyond this you’ll find out how to extend your app and add greater functionality, including notifications, location services, adverts and app billing (essential if you want to properly monetize your creation!). To make sure you have confidence at every stage in the process, the book also shows you how to release your app to the Play store – to make sure your maximising your efforts to create a popular Android application!
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Android Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Mastering images


There are two concepts that we must cover in this book before finishing this chapter about images. As you know, the images can be placed in multiple folders depending on the density of the screen—from low-density drawable-ldpi to high-density drawable-hdpi, extra extra-extra high-density drawable-xxxhdpi, and possibly more in the future. When we do this, we need to consider whether we want top quality images in all screens or a light APK. Replicating images will increase the size of our installer. This problem will disappear with the following component introduced in Android 5.0.

Vector drawables

These drawables are based on vector graphics; vector graphics can be scaled up and scaled down without losing any quality. With this, we just need a single drawable, and it will have excellent quality no matter the screen we use for it, be it an Android watch or an Android TV.

Vector drawables are defined in the same way that we define a shape—in an XML file. This is a simple vectordrawable...