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 Android Intent class


The Intent class is appropriately named. It is a class that demonstrates the intent of an Activity instance from our app. It makes intent clear and it also facilitates it.

All our apps so far have had just one Activity instance but many Android apps comprise more than one.

In perhaps its most common use, an Intent object allows us to switch between Activity instances. But, of course, Activity instances are made from classes. So, what happens to the data when we switch between these classes? The Intent class handles this problem for us as well by allowing us to pass data between them.

Intent classes aren't just about wiring up the Activities of our app. They also make it possible to interact with other apps, too. For example, we could provide a link in our app for the user to send an email, make a phone call, interact with social media, or open a web page in a browser, and have the email, dialer, web browser, or relevant social media app do all the work.

There aren't...