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

Styling a Compose app

Most of your Compose UI will likely use the built-in composable functions from the androidx.compose.material3 package. They implement the design language known as Material Design and its successor, Material You (which was introduced with Android 12). Material You is the native design language on Android, though it’s also available on other platforms. It expands on the idea of a pen, paper, and cards, and it makes heavy use of grid-based layouts, responsive animations, and transitions, as well as padding and depth effects. Material You advocates large buttons and rounded corners. Custom color themes can be generated from the user’s wallpaper.

Defining colors, shapes, and text styles

While apps should certainly honor both system and user preferences regarding visual appearance, you may want to add colors, shapes, or text styles that reflect your brand or corporate identity. So, how can you modify the look of the built-in Material composable functions...