Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin - Second Edition

By : Alex Forrester, Eran Boudjnah, Alexandru Dumbravan, Jomar Tigcal
Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin - Second Edition

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 Architecture Components

In this chapter, you will learn about the key components of the Android Jetpack libraries and what benefits they bring to the standard Android framework. You will also learn how to structure your code and give different responsibilities to your classes with the help of Jetpack components. Finally, you’ll improve the test coverage of your code.

By the end of this chapter, you’ll be able to create applications that handle the lifecycles of activities and fragments with ease. You’ll also know more about how to persist data on an Android device using Room and how to use ViewModels to separate your logic from your Views.

In the previous chapters, you learned how to write unit tests. The question is: what can you unit-test? Can you unit-test activities and fragments? It is hard to unit-test activities and fragments on your machine because of the way they are built. Testing would be easier if you could move the code away from activities...