Creating Your First App

This chapter is an introduction to Android, where you will set up your environment and focus on the fundamentals of Android development. By the end of this chapter, you will have gained the knowledge required to create an Android app from scratch and install it on a virtual or physical Android device.

You will be able to analyze and understand the importance of the AndroidManifest.xml file and use the Gradle build tool to configure your app and implement user interface (UI) elements from Material Design.

Android is the most widely used mobile phone operating system in the world, with over three billion active devices. This presents great opportunities to contribute and make an impact by learning Android and building apps that have a global reach. However, for a developer who is new to Android, there are many issues you must contend with in order to get started learning and becoming productive.

This book will address these issues. After learning the tooling and development environment, you will explore fundamental practices to build Android apps. We will cover a wide range of real-world development challenges faced by developers and explore various techniques to overcome them.

In this chapter, you will learn how to create a basic Android project and add features to it. You will be introduced to the comprehensive development environment of Android Studio and learn about the core areas of the software to enable you to work productively.

Android Studio provides all the tooling for application development but not the knowledge. This first chapter will guide you through using the software effectively to build an app and configure the most common areas of an Android project.

We will cover the following topics in the chapter:

• Creating an Android project with Android Studio
• Setting up a virtual device and running your app
• The Android Manifest
• Using Gradle to build, configure, and manage app dependencies
• Android application structure