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 analyzed alternatives to Room when it comes to persisting data. We looked first at SharedPreferences and how it constitutes a handy solution for data persistence when it’s in a key-value format and the amount of data is small. We also looked at DataStore and how we can use it like SharedPreferences but with built-in observability, which notifies us when values are changed.

Next, we looked over something that was continuously changing when it comes to the Android framework – the evolution of abstractions regarding a filesystem. We started with an overview of the types of storage that Android has and then took a more in-depth look at two of the abstractions – FileProvider, which your app can use to store files on a device and share them with others if necessary, and the SAF, which can be used to save files on the device in a location selected by a user.

We also used the benefits of FileProvider to generate URIs for files in order...