What this book covers
Chapter 1, Creating Your First App, shows how to use Android Studio to build your first Android app. Here, you will create an Android Studio project, understand what it’s made up of, and explore the tools necessary for building and deploying an app on a virtual device. You will also learn about the structure of an Android app.
Chapter 2, Building User Screen Flows, dives into the Android ecosystem and the building blocks of an Android application. Concepts such as activities and their lifecycle, intents, and tasks will be introduced, as well as restoring the state and passing data between screens or activities.
Chapter 3, Developing the UI with Fragments, teaches you the fundamentals of using fragments for the user interface of an Android application. You will learn how to use fragments in multiple ways to build application layouts for phones and tablets, including using the Jetpack Navigation component.
Chapter 4, Building App Navigation, goes through the different types of navigation in an application. You will learn about navigation drawers with sliding layouts, bottom navigation, and tabbed navigation.
Chapter 5, Essential Libraries: Retrofit, Moshi, and Glide, gives you an insight into how to build apps that fetch data from a remote data source with the use of the Retrofit library and the Moshi library to convert data into Kotlin objects. You will also learn about the Glide library, which loads remote images into your app.
Chapter 6, Adding and Interacting with RecyclerView, introduces the concept of building lists and displaying them with the help of the RecyclerView widget.
Chapter 7, Android Permissions and Google Maps, presents the concept of permissions and how to request them from the user in order for your app to execute specific tasks, as well as introducing you to the Maps API.
Chapter 8, Services, WorkManager, and Notifications, details the concept of background work in an Android app and how you can have your app execute certain tasks in a way that is invisible to the user, as well as covering how to show a notification of this work.
Chapter 9, Building User Interfaces Using Jetpack Compose, shows how Jetpack Compose works, how to apply styles and themes, and how to use Jetpack Compose in projects started with layout files.
Chapter 10, Unit Tests and Integration Tests with JUnit, Mockito, and Espresso, teaches you about the different types of tests for an Android application, what frameworks are used for each type of test, and the concept of test-driven development.
Chapter 11, Android Architecture Components, provides an insight into components from the Android Jetpack libraries, such as ViewModel, which will help separate the business logic from the user interface code. We will then look at how we can use observable data streams such as LiveData to deliver data to the user interface. Finally, we will look at the Room library to analyze how we can persist data.
Chapter 12, Persisting Data, shows you the various ways to store data on a device, from SharedPreferences to files. The Repository concept will also be introduced, giving you an idea of how to structure your app in different layers.
Chapter 13, Dependency Injection with Dagger, Hilt, and Koin, explains the concept of dependency injection and the benefits it provides to an application. Frameworks such as Dagger, Hilt, and Koin are introduced to help you manage your dependencies.
Chapter 14, Coroutines and Flow, introduces you to doing background operations and data manipulations with coroutines and Flow. You’ll also learn about manipulating and displaying data using Flow operators and LiveData transformation.
Chapter 15, Architecture Patterns, explains the architecture patterns you can use to structure your Android projects to separate them into different components with distinct functionality. These make it easier for you to develop, test, and maintain your code.
Chapter 16, Animations and Transitions with CoordinatorLayout and MotionLayout, discusses how to enhance your apps with animations and transitions with CoordinatorLayout and MotionLayout.
Chapter 17, Launching Your App on Google Play, concludes this book by showing you how to publish your apps on Google Play: from preparing a release to creating a Google Play Developer account, and finally launching your app.