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 the concept of DI and how it should be applied to separate concerns and prevent objects from having the responsibility of creating other objects and how this is of great benefit for testing. We started the chapter by analyzing the concept of manual DI. This served as a good example of how DI works and how it can be applied to an Android application; it served as the baseline when comparing the DI frameworks.

We also analyzed two of the most popular frameworks that help developers inject dependencies. We started with a powerful and fast framework called Dagger 2, which relies on annotation processors to generate code to perform an injection. We then looked at how Hilt reduced the complexity of Dagger for Android applications. We also investigated Koin, a lightweight framework written in Kotlin with slower performance but simpler integration and a lot of focus on Android components.

The exercises in this chapter were intended to explore how...