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

Summary

In this chapter, we analyzed the building blocks required to build a maintainable application. We also looked into one of the most common issues that developers come across when using the Android Framework, which is maintaining the states of objects during lifecycle changes.

We started by analyzing ViewModels and how they solve the issue of holding data during orientation changes. We added LiveData to ViewModels to show how the two complement each other and looked at how we can use other data streams with ViewModels and compare those with LiveData.

We then moved on to Room to show how we can persist data with minimal effort and without much SQLite boilerplate code. We also explored one-to-many and many-to-many relationships, as well as how to migrate data and break down complex objects into primitives for storage.

The activity we completed in this chapter serves as an example of what direction Android apps are heading in. However, this was not a complete example due...