Book Image

Android Studio 4.1 Development Essentials – Kotlin Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 4.1 Development Essentials – Kotlin Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Android 11 has a ton of new capabilities. It comes up with three foci: a people-centric approach to communication, controls to let users quickly access and manage all of their smart devices, and privacy to give users more ways to control how data on devices is shared. This book starts off with the steps necessary to set up an Android development and testing environment, followed by an introduction to programming in Kotlin. An overview of Android Studio and its architecture is provided, followed by an in-depth look at the design of Android applications and user interfaces using the Android Studio environment. You will also learn about the Android architecture components along with some advanced topics such as touch screen handling, gesture recognition, the recording and playback of audio, app links, dynamic delivery, the AndroidStudio profiler, Gradle build configuration, and submitting apps to the Google Play Developer Console. The concepts of material design are also covered in detail. This edition of the book also covers printing, transitions, and cloud-based file storage; foldable device support is the cherry on the cake. By the end of this course, you will be able to develop Android 11 Apps using Android Studio 4.1, Kotlin, and Android Jetpack. The code files for the book can be found here: https://www.ebookfrenzy.com/retail/as41kotlin/index.php
Table of Contents (95 chapters)
95
Index

64. An Introduction to Kotlin Coroutines

The previous chapter introduced the concepts of threading on Android and explained how the user interface of an app runs on the main thread. To avoid degrading or interrupting user interface responsiveness, it is important that time consuming tasks not block the execution of the main thread. One option, as outlined in the previous chapter, is to run any such tasks on a background thread, thereby leaving the main thread to continue managing the user interface. This can be achieved either directly using thread handlers or by making use of the AsyncTask class.

Although AsyncTask and thread handlers provide a way to perform tasks on separate threads, it can be time consuming to implement, and confusing to read and maintain the associated code in an app project. This approach is also not the most efficient solution when large numbers of threads are required by an app.

Fortunately, Kotlin provides a lightweight alternative in the form of Coroutines...