Book Image

Mastering Android Studio 3

By : Kyle Mew
Book Image

Mastering Android Studio 3

By: Kyle Mew

Overview of this book

Android Studio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed for developing Android apps. As with most development processes, Android keeps resources and logic nicely separated, and so this book covers the management of imagery and other resources, and the development and testing tools provided by the IDE. After introducing the software, the book moves straight into UI development using the sophisticated, WYSIWYG layout editor and XML code to design and test complex interfaces for a wide variety of screen configurations. With activity design covered, the book continues to guide the reader through application logic development, exploring the latest APIs provided by the SDK. Each topic will be demonstrated by working code samples that can be run on a device or emulator. One of Android Studio's greatest features is the large number of third-party plugins available for it, and throughout the book we will be exploring the most useful of these, along with samples and libraries that can be found on GitHub. The final module of the book deals with the final stages of development: building and distribution. The book concludes by taking the reader through the registration and publication processes required by Google. By the time you have finished the book, you will be able to build faster, smoother, and error-free Android applications, in less time and with fewer complications than you ever thought possible.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

An APK analysis

APK Analyzer is one of the handiest features of Android Studio; as its name suggests, it allows us to analyze APK files themselves, even performing a certain amount of reverse engineering by extracting resources and XML and allowing us to compare different versions.

The APK Analyzer can also be found in the Build menu, under Analyze APK.... Every time we run a project on a device or emulator, a debug APK is generated. This can be found in your project directories under; \SomeProject\App\build\outputs\apk\debug.

The Analyzer displays its output, as follows:

APK analysis

The Analyzer's output contains a wealth of information, beginning with its size and its compressed Play store size. It is possible to see at a glance which resources take up the most room and rectify this where possible, for example by using vectors instead of bitmaps.

The classes.dex file...