Book Image

Kickstart Modern Android Development with Jetpack and Kotlin

By : Catalin Ghita
5 (1)
Book Image

Kickstart Modern Android Development with Jetpack and Kotlin

5 (1)
By: Catalin Ghita

Overview of this book

With Jetpack libraries, you can build and design high-quality, robust Android apps that have an improved architecture and work consistently across different versions and devices. This book will help you understand how Jetpack allows developers to follow best practices and architectural patterns when building Android apps while also eliminating boilerplate code. Developers working with Android and Kotlin will be able to put their knowledge to work with this condensed practical guide to building apps with the most popular Jetpack libraries, including Jetpack Compose, ViewModel, Hilt, Room, Paging, Lifecycle, and Navigation. You'll get to grips with relevant libraries and architectural patterns, including popular libraries in the Android ecosystem such as Retrofit, Coroutines, and Flow while building modern applications with real-world data. By the end of this Android app development book, you'll have learned how to leverage Jetpack libraries and your knowledge of architectural concepts for building, designing, and testing robust Android applications for various use cases.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Exploring the Core Jetpack Suite and Other Libraries
7
Part 2: A Guide to Clean Application Architecture with Jetpack Libraries
13
Part 3: Diving into Other Jetpack Libraries

Introducing the Jetpack Lifecycle components

It's no secret by now that components within the Android framework have certain lifecycles that we must respect when we need to interact with them. The most common components that own a lifecycle are Activity and Fragment.

As programmers, we cannot control the lifecycle of Android components because their lifecycle is defined and controlled by the system or the way Android works.

Going back to Lifecycle components, a very good example is the entry point to our Android application, represented by the Activity component, which, as we know, possesses a lifecycle. This means that in order to create a screen in our Android application, we need to create an Activity component – from this point on, all our components must be aware of its lifecycle to not leak any memory.

Now, when we say that Activity has a system-defined lifecycle, this actually translates into our Activity class inheriting from ComponentActivity(), which...