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

Using WorkManager

WorkManager is a Jetpack library for background operations that can be delayed and can run based on the constraints you set. It is ideal for doing something that must be run but can be done later or at regular intervals, regardless of whether the app is running or not.

You can use WorkManager to run tasks such as fetching the data from the network and storing it in your database at scheduled intervals. WorkManager will run the task even if the app has been closed or if the device restarts. This will keep your database up to date with your backend.

You can add WorkManager to your project by adding the following code to your app/build.gradle file dependencies:

implementation 'androidx.work:work-runtime:2.7.1'

WorkManager can call the repository to fetch and store data from either the local database or the network server.

Let’s try adding WorkManager to an Android project.

Exercise 15.03 – adding WorkManager to an Android Project...