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

Types of testing

Both tests rely on the Java JUnit library, which helps developers set up their tests and group them into different categories. It also provides different configuration options, as well as extensions that other libraries can build upon. We will also investigate the testing pyramid, which helps guide developers as to how to structure their tests.

We will start at the bottom of the pyramid, which is represented by unit tests, move upward through integration tests, and finally, reach the top, which is represented by end-to-end tests (UI tests). You’ll have the opportunity to learn about the tools that aid in writing each of these types of tests:

  • Mockito and mockito-kotlin, which help mainly in unit tests and are useful for creating mocks or test doubles in which we can manipulate inputs so that we can assert different scenarios. (A mock or test double is an object that mimics the implementation of another object. Every time a test interacts with mocks...