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

Starting a background task using WorkManager

The first question we will address here is should we opt for WorkManager or a foreground service? To answer that, a good rule of thumb is to ask whether you need the action to be tracked by the user in real time.

If the answer is yes (for example, if you have a task such as responding to the user’s location or playing music in the background), then you should use a foreground service with its attached notification to give the user a real-time indication of state. When the background task can be delayed or does not require user interaction (for example, downloading a large file), use WorkManager.

Note

Starting with version 2.3.0-alpha02 of WorkManager, you can launch a foreground service via the WorkManager singleton by calling setForegroundAsync(ForegroundInfo). Our control over that foreground service is quite limited. It does allow you to attach a (predefined) notification to the work, which is why it is worth mentioning...