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

Architecture Patterns

This chapter will introduce you to architectural patterns you can use for your Android projects. It covers using the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, adding ViewModels, and using data binding. You will also learn about using the Repository pattern for caching data and WorkManager for scheduling data retrieval and storage.

By the end of the chapter, you will be able to structure your Android project using MVVM and data binding. You will also be able to use the Repository pattern with the Room library to cache data and WorkManager to fetch and save data at a scheduled interval.

In the previous chapter, you learned about using Coroutines and Flow for background operations and data manipulation. Now, you will learn about architectural patterns so you can improve your application.

When developing an Android application, you may tend to write most of the code (including business logic) in activities or fragments. This will make your project hard to test...