Book Image

Android Studio 4.0 Development Essentials - Kotlin Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 4.0 Development Essentials - Kotlin Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Kotlin as an Android-compatible programming language is becoming increasingly popular. Fully updated for Android Studio 4.0, this book will teach you the skills necessary to develop Android-based applications using Kotlin. Starting with the basics, this book outlines the steps necessary to set up Android development and testing environments, and goes on to introduce you to programming in Kotlin. You’ll practice Java to Kotlin code conversion and explore data types, operators, expressions, loops, functions, as well as the basics of OOP in Kotlin. You’ll then learn about Android architecture components and advanced topics, such as intents, touchscreen handling, gesture recognition, multi-window support integration, and biometric authentication. As you make progress, you’ll explore Android Studio 4.0’s key features, including layout editor, direct reply notifications, and dynamic delivery. You’ll also delve into Android Jetpack and create a sample app project using ViewModel, the Android Jetpack component. Finally, you will upload your app to Google Play Console and model the build process using Gradle. By the end of this Android book, you’ll be fully prepared to develop applications using Android Studio 4.0 and Kotlin.
Table of Contents (97 chapters)
97
Index

39.1 What is Android Jetpack?

Android Jetpack consists of Android Studio, the Android Architecture Components and Android Support Library together with a set of guidelines that recommend how an Android App should be structured. The Android Architecture Components are designed to make it quicker and easier both to perform common tasks when developing Android apps while also conforming to the key principle of the architectural guidelines.

While all of the Android Architecture Components will be covered in this book, the objective of this chapter is to introduce the key architectural guidelines together with the ViewModel, LiveData, Lifecycle components while also introducing Data Binding and the use of Repositories.

Before moving on, it is important to understand the Jetpack approach to app development is not mandatory. While highlighting some of the shortcoming of other techniques that have gained popularity of the years, Google stopped short of completely condemning those approaches...