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

Summary

This chapter covered creating animations and transitions with CoordinatorLayout and MotionLayout. Animations can improve the usability of our app and make it stand out compared to other apps.

We started by customizing the transition when opening and closing an activity with activity transitions. We also learned about adding shared element transitions when an activity and the activity that it opens both contain the same elements, enabling us to highlight this link between the shared elements to users.

We learned how we can use CoordinatorLayout to handle the motion of its child views. Some views have built-in behaviors that handle how they work inside CoordinatorLayout. You can add custom behaviors to other views too. Then, we moved on to using MotionLayout to create animations by specifying the start constraint, end constraint, and the transition between them. We also looked into modifying the motion path by adding keyframes in the middle of an animation. We learned about...