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

Android permissions and Marshmallows


When our apps want to do something that has the potential to cause harm to a user's device or perhaps the user's privacy, Android requires us to deal with it in a specific way, usually by having our app ask permission from the user before we do certain things.

With the introduction of Android Marshmallow at the end of 2015, the way that we had to handle things changed—but only for the new Marshmallow devices.

The current situation, therefore, is that we need to deal with two possible situations: Marshmallow and pre-Marshmallow.

Pre-Marshmallow permissions

Before Marshmallow, if we wanted our app to do something that could potentially cause harm, such as connect to the Internet (our next app will do this), get a GPS location, take pictures, access the address book, and much more, we needed to add a line of code to the AndroidManifest.xml file.

Then, when users install our app from Google Play, a little pop-up warning appears letting them know exactly what potentially...