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

Android Studio testing tips

Android Studio comes with a good set of shortcuts and visual tools to help with testing. If you want to create a new test for your class or go to existing tests for your class, you can use the Ctrl + Shift + T (Windows) or Command + Shift + T (Mac) shortcut. You will need to make sure that the contents of your class are currently in focus in the editor for the keyboard shortcut to take effect.

In order to run tests, there are multiple options: right-click your file or the package and select the Run 'Tests in…' option, or if you want to run a test independently, you can go to the particular test method and select the green icon at the top of the class, which will execute all the tests in the class.

Figure 10.2 – Running a group of tests

Figure 10.2 – Running a group of tests

For an individual test, you can click the green icon next to the @Test annotated methods.

Figure 10.3 – Icons for running individual tests

Figure 10.3 – Icons for running individual...