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

The importance of patterns


When a software developer has to develop a feature or a component with a certain functionality, it can usually be done in different ways; it can be done with different code or with a different structure. It is very likely that the same problem has been solved by other developers so many times that the solution is abstracted from particular implementations and transformed into a pattern. Rather than invent the wheel again, it is preferable to know and implement these patterns.

When developing on Android, we use patterns every day even if we aren't aware of it. Most of the time, we use implementations of the patterns built in Android. For instance, when we want to perform a click on a button and set OnClickListener—in other words, wait for the onClick() method to be called—we use an observer pattern implementation. If we create a popup, AlertDialog, we use AlertDialog.Builder, which uses the Builder pattern. There are many examples, but what we want is to be able...