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

Animations with MotionLayout

Creating animations in Android is sometimes time-consuming. You need to work on XML and code files even to create simple animations. More complicated animations and transitions take even more time to make.

To help developers easily make animations, Google created MotionLayout. This is a new way to create motion and animations through XML. It is available starting at API level 14 (Android 4.0).

With MotionLayout, we can animate the position, width/height, visibility, alpha, color, rotation, elevation, and other attributes of one or more views. Normally, some of these are hard to do with code, but MotionLayout allows us to easily adjust them using declarative XML so that we can focus more on our application.

Let’s get started by adding MotionLayout to our application.

Adding MotionLayout

To add MotionLayout to your project, you just need to add the dependency for ConstraintLayout 2.0. ConstraintLayout 2.0 is the new version of ConstraintLayout...