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

69.5 Checking for Freeform Support

As outlined earlier in the chapter, Google is leaving the choice of whether to enable freeform multi-window mode to the individual Android device manufacturers. Since it only makes sense to use freeform on larger devices, there is no guarantee that freeform will be available on every device on which an app is likely to run. Fortunately all of the freeform specific methods and attributes are ignored by the system if freeform mode is not available on a device, so using these will not cause the app to crash on a non-freeform device. Situations might arise, however, where it may be useful to be able to detect if a device supports freeform multi-window mode. Fortunately, this can be achieved by checking for the freeform window management feature in the package manager. The following code example checks for freeform multi-window support and returns a Boolean value based on the result of the test:

fun checkFreeform(): Boolean {

   &...