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

Bottom navigation

Bottom navigation is used when there are a limited number of top-level destinations, and these can range from three to five primary destinations that are not related to each other. Each item on the bottom navigation bar displays an icon and an optional text label.

This navigation allows quick access as the items are always available, no matter which secondary destination of the app the user navigates to.

Exercise 4.02 – adding bottom navigation to your app

Create a new app in Android Studio named Bottom Navigation using the Empty Activity project template, leaving all the other defaults as they are. Do not use the Bottom Navigation Activity project template, as we are going to use incremental steps to build the app.

You will build a loyalty app that provides offers, rewards, and so on for customers who have signed up to use it. Bottom navigation is quite common for this kind of app because there will typically be limited top-level destinations.

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