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

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at how we can build user interfaces using Jetpack Compose. We started by creating simple user interface elements, and we looked at how we can make an entire screen using @Composable functions without any XML code.

Then, we analyzed state management and how we can handle user input, and looked at patterns such as state hoisting, in which we keep our functions as stateless as possible to increase reusability. We then looked at how we can define our own user interface elements and apply themes and styles to them, which allows us to change the entire look of an application without modifying the screens that use the changed elements.

Finally, we looked at how we can add Compose to an existing project and how Compose interacts with popular libraries used for app development. In the chapter’s activity, we applied all these concepts and created an application with a consistent user interface definition with multiple screens defined in Compose...