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

Developing across platforms

One of the biggest advantages of a cross-platform framework is that you generate your apps from one code base. This allows you to reuse code and assets (such as images and text). In the previous section, Building a cross-platform app, you learned about the project structure of Compose Multiplatform and how you can share a composable function across Android and the desktop. I explained the relationship between the four main modules androidApp, iosApp, desktopApp, and shared, and introduced a concept called source sets, which help structure your shared code.

So far, we have focused on reusing code. But how about other resources? Usually, apps contain a lot of text that is shown to the user. What’s more, this text is often available in different languages. Consequently, changing, adding, or deleting text should apply to all platforms. To put it another way, we don’t want copies of text in androidApp and desktopApp. But how do we do that?

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