Book Image

Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials - Kotlin Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials - Kotlin Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Popularity of Kotlin as an Android-compatible language keeps growing every day. This book will help you to build your own Android applications using Kotlin. Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials Kotlin Edition first teaches you to install Android development and test environment on different operating systems. Next, you will create an Android app and a virtual device in Android studio, and install an Android application on emulators. You will test apps on physical android devices, then study Android Studio code editor, Android architecture, and the anatomy of an Android app. The focus then shifts to Kotlin language. You’ll get an overview of Kotlin language and practice converting code from Java to Kotlin. You’ll also explore Kotlin data types, operators, expressions, loops, functions, and the basics of OOP concept in Kotlin. This book will then cover Android Jetpack and how to create an example app project using ViewModel component, as well as advanced topics such as views and widgets implementation, multi-window support integration, and biometric authentication. Finally, you will learn to upload your app to the Google Play Console and handle the build process with Gradle. By the end of this book, you will have gained enough knowledge to develop powerful Android applications using Kotlin.
Table of Contents (93 chapters)
93
Index

63.8 Summary

Android services are a powerful mechanism that allows applications to perform tasks in the background. A service, once launched, will continue to run regardless of whether the calling application is the foreground task or not, and even in the event that the component that initiated the service is destroyed.

Services are subclassed from the Android Service class and fall into the category of either started services or bound services. Started services run until they are stopped or destroyed and do not inherently provide a mechanism for interaction or data exchange with other components. Bound services, on the other hand, provide a communication interface to other client components and generally run until the last client unbinds from the service.

By default, services run locally within the same process and main thread as the calling application. A new thread should, therefore, be created within the service for the purpose of handling CPU intensive tasks. Remote services...