Book Image

Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials - Java Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials - Java Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Android applications have become an important part of our daily lives and lots of effort goes into developing an Android application. This book will help you to build you own Android applications using Java. Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials – Java 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 emulator. You will test apps on physical Android devices, then study Android Studio code editor and constraint layout, Android architecture, the anatomy of an Android app, and Android activity state changes. The book then covers advanced topics such as views and widgets implementation, multi-window support integration, and biometric authentication, and finally, you will learn to upload your app to 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 Java.
Table of Contents (86 chapters)
86
Index

82.2 Android App Bundles

When a user installs an app from Google Play, the app is downloaded in the form of an APK file. This file contains everything needed to install and run the app on the user’s device. Prior to the introduction of Android Studio 3.2, the developer would generate one or more APK files using Android Studio and upload them to Google Play. In order to support multiple device types, screen sizes and locales this would require either the creation and upload of multiple APK files customized for each target device and locale, or the generation of a large universal APK containing all of the different configuration resources and platform binaries within a single package.

Creating multiple APK files involved a significant amount of work that had to be repeated each time the app needed to be updated imposing a considerable time overhead to the app release process.

The universal APK option, while less of a burden to the developer, caused an entirely unexpected...