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

84.8 Generating Test APK Files

An optional step at this stage is to generate APK files from the app bundle and install and run them on devices or emulator sessions. Google provides a command-line tool called bundletool designed specifically for this purpose which can be downloaded from the following URL:

https://github.com/google/bundletool/releases

At time of writing, bundletool is provide as a .jar file which can be executed from the command line as follows (noting that the version number may have changed since this book was published):

java -jar bundletool-all-0.9.0.jar

Running the above command will list all of the options available within the tool. To generate the APK files from the app bundle, the build-apks option is used. To generate APK files that can be installed onto a device or emulator the files will also need to be signed. To achieve this include the --ks option specifying the path of the keystore file created earlier in the chapter, together with the --ks...