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

Content providers


A content provider is very similar to the concept of a DAO; it is an interface between the data and the app that allows different apps to exchange information. We can decide whether we want it to be public or not, whether we want other apps to be able to get data from it, and whether it will only be used internally in our app. The data can be stored in a database such as the one we are about to create. It can be stored in files; for instance, if we want access to videos or pictures from the gallery, we'll use an Android built-in media content provider. Alternatively, it can be obtained from the network:

A content provider must be declared in the manifest as it is a component of our app and also specify whether or not it will be accessible to other apps, which is controlled by the attribute exported. Let's start by creating our own content provider.

To create a content provider, create a MAAProvider class and extend ContentProvider. We will be asked to implement the following...