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

57.8 Summary

This chapter has provided an overview of threading within Android applications. When an application is first launched in a process, the runtime system creates a main thread in which all subsequently launched application components run by default. The primary role of the main thread is to handle the user interface, so any time consuming tasks performed in that thread will give the appearance that the application has locked up. It is essential, therefore, that tasks likely to take time to complete be started in a separate thread.

Because the Android user interface toolkit is not thread-safe, changes to the user interface should not be made in any thread other than the main thread. Background tasks may be performed in a separate thread by subclassing the AsyncTask class and implementing the class methods to perform the task and update the user interface.