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 Jetpack Room

Modern applications should be available for use in any conditions, including when the user is missing an internet connection. This allows apps to provide a seamless user experience and usability even when the user's device cannot access the network.

In this section, we will discuss the following:

  • Exploring the caching mechanism on Android
  • Introducing Jetpack Room as a solution for local caching

So, let's begin!

Exploring the caching mechanism on Android

To cache specific content or application data, reliable Android apps make use of the various offline caching mechanisms that are suitable for different use cases:

  • Shared preferences are used to store lightweight data (such as user-related selections) as key-value pairs. This option shouldn't be used to store objects that are part of the app's content.
  • Device storage (either internal or external) is used for storing heavyweight data (such as files, pictures...