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

Saving and restoring the Activity state

In this section, you’ll explore how your Activity saves and restores the state. As you’ve learned in the previous section, configuration changes, such as rotating the phone, cause the Activity to be recreated. This can also happen if the system has to kill your app in order to free up memory.

In these scenarios, it is important to preserve the state of the Activity and then restore it. In the next two exercises, you’ll work through an example ensuring that the user’s data is restored when TextView is created and populated from a user’s data after filling in a form.

Exercise 2.02 – saving and restoring the state in layouts

In this exercise, firstly create an application called Save and Restore with an empty activity. The app you are going to create will have a simple form that offers a discount code for a user’s favorite restaurant if they enter some personal details (no actual information...