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

Configuring the project


In order for us to use the Google Play Service APIs, we need to set up our project with the Google Play Services SDK. If you have not already installed this, go to Android SDK Manager and get the Google Play Service SDK.

Now that our app uses Google Play services, to test the app, you must ensure that you run the app on either of the following:

  1. An Android device with Android 2.3 or higher that has Google Play Store (Recommended).

  2. An emulator that has Google Play Services set up. If you use Genymotion, Google Play services will not be installed by default:

We need to make Google Play services APIs available to our app.

Open the app's build.gradle file and add the play-services library under dependencies. The line to add the build.gradle file should be similar to this:

compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services:7.8.0'

Ensure that you change this to the latest version of play-services and update it when a new version is released.

Save the file and click on Sync Project with...