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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to use Window Size Classes, Jetpack WindowManager, and Canonical Layouts to make sure your app looks great on smartphones, tablets, and foldable devices. First, we investigated how screen sizes, form factors, and hardware features influence app layout. Then, I explained how Window Size Classes help structure your UI, and how you can compute them during runtime.

The second main section, Using Jetpack WindowManager, explained why relying solely on Window Size Classes is not enough to create awesome layouts for tablets and foldables. You learned how to query hardware features such as hinge orientation and device posture and how this helps fine-tune your UI.

Finally, the Organizing the screen content section introduced a Material Design concept called Canonical Layouts. You learned which Canonical Layouts have been defined so far and in which scenarios they work best.

In the final chapter, Bringing Your Compose UI to Different Platforms...