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

Tabbed navigation

Tabbed navigation is mostly used when you want to display related items. It is common to have fixed tabs if there’s only a few of them (typically between two and five tabs) and scrolling horizontal tabs if you have more than five tabs. They are used mostly for grouping destinations that are at the same hierarchical level.

This can be the primary navigation if the destinations are related. This might be the case if the app you developed is in a narrow or specific subject field where the primary destinations are related, such as a news app. More commonly, it is used with bottom navigation to present secondary navigation that’s available within a primary destination. The following exercise demonstrates using tabbed navigation for displaying related items.

Exercise 4.03 – using tabs for app navigation

Create a new app in Android Studio with an Empty Activity named Tab Navigation. You are going to build a skeleton movies app that displays...