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

Managing app releases

You can slowly release your apps on different tracks to test them before publicly rolling them out to users. You can also do timed publishing to make the app available on a certain date instead of automatically publishing it once approved by Google.

Release tracks

When creating a release for an app, you can choose between four different tracks:

  • Production is where everyone can see the app.
  • Open testing is targeted at wider public testing. The release will be available on Google Play, and anyone can join the beta program and test.
  • Closed testing is intended for small groups of users testing pre-release versions.
  • Internal testing is for the developer/tester builds while developing/testing an app.

The internal, closed, and open tracks allow developers to create a special release and allow real users to download it while the rest are on the production version. This allows you to know whether the release has bugs and quickly fix them...