Book Image

Android Studio Cookbook

By : Mike van Drongelen
Book Image

Android Studio Cookbook

By: Mike van Drongelen

Overview of this book

This book starts with an introduction of Android Studio and why you should use this IDE rather than Eclipse. Moving ahead, it teaches you to build a simple app that requires no backend setup but uses Google Cloud or Parse instead. After that, you will learn how to create an Android app that can send and receive text and images using Google Cloud or Parse as a backend. It explains the concepts of Material design and how to apply them to an Android app. Also, it shows you how to build an app that runs on an Android wear device. Later, it explains how to build an app that takes advantage of the latest Android SDK while still supporting older Android versions. It also demonstrates how the performance of an app can be improved and how memory management tools that come with the Android Studio IDE can help you achieve this. By the end of the book, you will be able to develop high quality apps with a minimum amount of effort using the Android Studio IDE.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Android Studio Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


Many applications require a backend solution, allowing users to communicate with a server or with each other like in social apps, for example, and which application is not social today? You can also think of a business app, for example, one for logistic purposes.

Sure, we can write our own API, host it somewhere, and write some Android code to communicate with it, including querying, caching, and all other functionalities that our application needs to support. Unfortunately, developing all this could be a very time-consuming process, and since this is often the most valuable asset, there must be another way to do this.

The good news is that you do not have to do all these things yourself. There are a couple of ready-made mobile backend solutions available on the Internet, such as QuickBlox, Firebase, Google App Engine, and Parse to mention just a few of the most well-known ones.

Each of these solutions do particular things well; although, one solution will be more suitable than...