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

Requesting permission from the user

Our app might want to implement certain features that Google deems dangerous. This usually means access to those features could risk the user’s privacy. For example, some permissions may allow you to read users’ messages or determine their current location.

Depending on the required permission and the target Android API level we are developing, we may need to request that permission from the user. If the device is running on Android 6 (Marshmallow, API level 23), and the target API of our app is 23 or higher (it almost certainly will be, as most devices by now will run newer versions of Android), there will be no alert for the user about any permissions requested by the app at install time. Instead, our app must ask the user to grant those permissions at runtime.

When we request permission, the user sees a dialog like the one shown in Figure 7.1.

Figure 7.1 – Permission dialog for device location access

Figure 7.1 – Permission dialog for device location...