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

The Activity lifecycle

In the previous chapter, we used the onCreate(saveInstanceState: Bundle?) method to display a layout in the UI of our screen. Now, we’ll explore in more detail how the Android system interacts with your application to make this happen. As soon as an Activity is launched, it goes through a series of steps to take it through initialization, from preparing to be displayed to being partially displayed and then fully displayed.

There are also steps that correspond with your application being hidden, backgrounded, and then destroyed. This process is called the Activity lifecycle. For every one of these steps, there is a callback that your Activity can use to perform actions such as creating and changing the display and saving data when your app has been put into the background and then restoring that data after your app comes back into the foreground.

These callbacks are made on your Activity’s parent, and it’s up to you to decide whether...