Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By : John Horton, Paresh Mayani
Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By: John Horton, Paresh Mayani

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular OS in the world. There are millions of devices accessing tens of thousands of applications. It is many people's entry point into the world of technology; it is an operating system for everyone. Despite this, the entry-fee to actually make Android applications is usually a computer science degree, or five years’ worth of Java experience. Android Programming for Beginners will be your companion to create Android applications from scratch—whether you’re looking to start your programming career, make an application for work, be reintroduced to mobile development, or are just looking to program for fun. We will introduce you to all the fundamental concepts of programming in an Android context, from the Java basics to working with the Android API. All examples are created from within Android Studio, the official Android development environment that helps supercharge your application development process. After this crash-course, we’ll dive deeper into Android programming and you’ll learn how to create applications with a professional-standard UI through fragments, make location-aware apps with Google Maps integration, and store your user’s data with SQLite. In addition, you’ll see how to make your apps multilingual, capture images from a device’s camera, and work with graphics, sound, and animations too. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to start building your own custom applications in Android and Java.
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Android Programming for Beginners
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction to the Android lifecycle


We have talked a bit about the structure of our code; that we write classes, and within those classes we have methods that contain our code. We also know that when we want the code within a method to run (be executed), we call that method by using its name.

Also, in Chapter 2, Java - First Contact, we learned that Android itself calls the onCreate method just before the app is ready to start. We saw this when we outputted to the logcat and used the Toast class to send a pop-up message to the user.

What we will look at now is what happens throughout the lifecycle of every app we write: when it starts and ends, as well as a few stages in between. And what we will see is that Android actually interacts with our app on numerous occasions, each and every time it is run.

It does so by calling methods that are contained within the Activity class. Even if the method is not visible within our Java code, it is still being called by Android at the appropriate time...