Book Image

Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners

By : John Horton
5 (1)
Book Image

Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners

5 (1)
By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world and Kotlin has been declared by Google as a first-class programming language to build Android apps. With the imminent arrival of the most anticipated Android update, Android 10 (Q), this book gets you started building apps compatible with the latest version of Android. It adopts a project-style approach, where we focus on teaching the fundamentals of Android app development and the essentials of Kotlin by building three real-world apps and more than a dozen mini-apps. The book begins by giving you a strong grasp of how Kotlin and Android work together before gradually moving onto exploring the various Android APIs for building stunning apps for Android with ease. You will learn to make your apps more presentable using different layouts. You will dive deep into Kotlin programming concepts such as variables, functions, data structures, Object-Oriented code, and how to connect your Kotlin code to the UI. You will learn to add multilingual text so that your app is accessible to millions of more potential users. You will learn how animation, graphics, and sound effects work and are implemented in your Android app. By the end of the book, you will have sound knowledge about significant Kotlin programming concepts and start building your own fully featured Android apps.
Table of Contents (33 chapters)
Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners
Contributors
Preface
Index

Persisting data with SharedPreferences


In Android, there are a few ways to make data persist. By persist, I mean that if the user quits the app, then when they come back to it their data will still be available. Which technique is the correct one to use is dependent upon the app and the type of data.

In this book, we will look at three ways to make data persist. For saving our user's settings, we only need a simple method. After all, we just need to know whether they want the decorative divider between each of the notes in the RecyclerView widget.

Let's look at how we can make our apps save and reload variables to the internal storage of the device. We need to use the SharedPreferences class. SharedPreferences is a class that provides access to data that can be accessed and edited by all the classes of an app. Let's look at how we can use it:

// A SharedPreferences instance for reading data
val prefs = getSharedPreferences(
         "My app",
          Context.MODE_PRIVATE)

// A SharedPreferences...