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

Organizing the screen content

In the previous sections, I explained that to make your app look great on a wide range of devices, you should build its layout on top of Window Size Classes and foldable-related events emitted by Jetpack WindowManager. But what does layout refer to? Figure 11.8 shows the ComposeUnitConverter sample from Chapters 6 and 7.

Figure 11.8 – The ComposeUnitConverter sample

Figure 11.8 – The ComposeUnitConverter sample

There appear to be three areas: the content, bottom navigation, and the top app bar. However, Material You (the design language and design system used on Android) puts the latter two in one bucket, navigation. Therefore, inside the app window, there are only two major blocks or areas: the content (sometimes referred to as body) and the navigation. How these blocks are laid out is defined in the Material You documentation (https://m3.material.io/foundations/layout/understanding-layout/overview). For example, bottom navigation should be used only if the horizontal...