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

Starting with lists


If you have heard of RecyclerView, you might wonder why we are going through ListView. The RecyclerView widget is new; it came out with Android Lollipop, and is a revolution when displaying a list of items; it can do it vertically and horizontally, as a list or as a grid, or with nice animations among other improvements.

Answering the question, even if RecyclerView is more efficient and flexible in some scenarios, it needs extra coding to achieve the same result, so there are still reasons to use ListView. For example, there is no onItemClickListener() for item selection in RecyclerView, and there is no visual feedback when we click on an item. If we don't need customization and animations, for instance for a simple data picker popup, this could be a dialog where we just have to select a country. In this case, it's perfectly fine to use ListView rather than RecyclerView.

Another reason to start with ListView is that RecyclerView solves most of the problems presented when...