Book Image

Android UI Development with Jetpack Compose - Second Edition

By : Thomas Künneth
5 (1)
Book Image

Android UI Development with Jetpack Compose - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Thomas Künneth

Overview of this book

Compose has caused a paradigm shift in Android development, introducing a variety of new concepts that are essential to an Android developer’s learning journey. It solves a lot of pain points associated with Android development and is touted to become the default way to building Android apps over the next few years. This second edition has been thoroughly updated to reflect all changes and additions that were made by Google since the initial stable release, and all examples are based on Material 3 (also called Material You). This book uses practical examples to help you understand the fundamental concepts of Jetpack Compose and how to use them when you are building your own Android applications. You’ll begin by getting an in-depth explanation of the declarative approach, along with its differences from and advantages over traditional user interface (UI) frameworks. Having laid this foundation, the next set of chapters take a practical approach to show you how to write your first composable function. The chapters will also help you master layouts, an important core component of every UI framework, and then move to more advanced topics such as animation, testing, and architectural best practices. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to write your own Android apps using Jetpack Compose and Material Design.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Fundamentals of Jetpack Compose
5
Part 2: Building User Interfaces
10
Part 3: Advanced Topics

Understanding different form factors

Android has always been great at supporting different screen sizes, pixel densities, and aspect ratios. These criteria contribute to two terms, form factor and device class. The latter assigns hardware to broad categories, such as smartphones, tablets, foldables, TVs, and watches. Smartwatches have tiny screens. We need to consider carefully what content should be displayed. Television sets feature huge screens but are watched from a greater distance and are operated with remote controls; we need to make sure content remains readable and easily navigable.

Smartphones usually have smaller screens than foldables, which in turn have displays smaller than or like tablets. All are held in our hands and can be rotated. That’s where the form factor becomes important: it describes the size, shape, and natural orientation (the way we hold it most of the time) of a device. Smartphones typically are more tall than wide, resembling a portrait. Tablets...