Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin - Second Edition

By : Alex Forrester, Eran Boudjnah, Alexandru Dumbravan, Jomar Tigcal
5 (1)
Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Alex Forrester, Eran Boudjnah, Alexandru Dumbravan, Jomar Tigcal

Overview of this book

Looking to kick-start your app development journey with Android 13, but don’t know where to start? How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin is a comprehensive guide that will help jump-start your Android development practice. This book starts with the fundamentals of app development, enabling you to utilize Android Studio and Kotlin to get started with building Android projects. You'll learn how to create apps and run them on virtual devices through guided exercises. Progressing through the chapters, you'll delve into Android's RecyclerView to make the most of lists, images, and maps, and see how to fetch data from a web service. You'll also get to grips with testing, learning how to keep your architecture clean, understanding how to persist data, and gaining basic knowledge of the dependency injection pattern. Finally, you'll see how to publish your apps on the Google Play store. You'll work on realistic projects that are split up into bitesize exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. You'll build apps to create quizzes, read news articles, check weather reports, store recipes, retrieve movie information, and remind you where you parked your car. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to build your own creative Android applications using Kotlin.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
1
Part 1: Android Foundation
6
Part 2: Displaying Network Calls
12
Part 3: Testing and Code Structure
17
Part 4: Polishing and Publishing an App

Services, WorkManager, and Notifications

This chapter will introduce you to the concepts of managing long-running tasks in the background of an app. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to trigger a background task, create a notification for the user when a background task is complete, and launch an application from a notification. This chapter will give you a solid understanding of how to manage background tasks and keep the user informed about the progress of these tasks.

In the previous chapter, we learned how to request permissions from the user and use Google’s Maps API. With that knowledge, we obtained the user’s location and allowed them to deploy an agent on a local map. In this chapter, we will learn how to track a long-running process and report its progress to the user.

We will build an example app where we will assume that Secret Cat Agents (SCAs) get deployed in a record time of 15 seconds. When a cat successfully deploys, we will notify the...