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

Creating the database


To understand how databases work in Android, we will continue working on our example app, MasteringAndroidApp, creating a database to store the job offers that will be used to see the content in offline mode. This means that if we open the app once, the job offers will be kept in the device allowing us to see the information if opened without an Internet connection.

There are four mechanisms to persist data in Android:

  • Shared preferences: These preferences are used to store basic information in a key-value structure

  • The internal storage: This storage saves files that are private to your app

  • The external storage: This storage saves files which can be shared with other apps

  • The SQLite database: This database, based on the popular SQL, allows us to write and read information in a structured way

We can create simple structures, such as one-table databases, as well as complex structures with more than one table. We can combine the output of different tables to create complex...