Book Image

Android Studio 4.0 Development Essentials - Java Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 4.0 Development Essentials - Java Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Android rolls out frequent updates to meet the demands of the dynamic mobile market and to enable its developer community to lead advancements in application development. This book focuses on the updated features of Android Studio (the fully integrated development environment launched by Google) to build reliable Android applications using Java. The book starts by outlining the steps necessary to set up an Android development and testing environment. You’ll then learn how to create user interfaces with the help of Android Studio Layout Editor, XML files, and by writing the code in Java. The book introduces you to Android architecture components and advanced topics such as intents, touchscreen handling, gesture recognition, multi-window support integration, and biometric authentication, and lets you explore key features of Android Studio 4.0, including the layout editor, direct reply notifications, and dynamic delivery. You’ll also cover Android Jetpack in detail and create a sample app project using the ViewModel component. Finally, you’ll upload your app to the Google Play Console and handle the build process with Gradle. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the skills necessary to develop applications using Android Studio 4.0 and Java.
Table of Contents (88 chapters)
88
Index

32.1 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...