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

The lifecycle demo app


In this section, we will do a quick experiment that will help to familiarize us with the lifecycle functions that our app uses and give us a chance to play around with a bit more Kotlin code.

Follow these steps to start a new project and then we can add some code:

  1. Start a new project and choose the Basic Activity project template; this is because during this project, we will also look at the functions that control the app menu and the Empty Activity option doesn't generate a menu.

  2. Call it Lifecycle Demo. The code is in the download bundle in the Chapter06/Lifecycle Demo folder, should you wish to refer to it or copy and paste it.

  3. Keep the other settings as they have been in all our example apps so far.

  4. Wait for Android Studio to generate the project files and then open the MainActivity.kt file in the code editor (if it is not opened for you by default) by left-clicking on the MainActivity tab above the editor.

We will only need the MainActivity.kt file for this demonstration...