Category: Android Studio

An essential part of developing Android apps involves the interaction between the code and the views that make up the user interface layouts. This chapter will look at the options available for gaining access to layout views in code, emphasizing an option known as view binding. Once the basics of view bindings have been covered,…

Regardless of your prior programming experiences, be it Windows, macOS, Linux, or even iOS based, the chances are good that Android development is quite unlike anything you have encountered before. Therefore, this chapter’s objective is to provide an understanding of the high-level concepts behind the architecture of Android applications. In doing so, we will explore…

So far, in this book, steps have been taken to set up an environment suitable for developing Android applications using Android Studio. An initial step has also been taken into the application development process by creating an Android Studio application project. However, before delving further into the practical matters of Android application development, it is…

Developing applications for Android involves a considerable amount of programming work which, by definition, involves typing, reviewing, and modifying lines of code. Unsurprisingly, most of a developer’s time spent using Android Studio will typically involve editing code within the editor window. The modern code editor must go far beyond the basics of typing, deleting, cutting,…

While much can be achieved by testing applications using an Android Virtual Device (AVD), there is no substitute for performing real-world application testing on a physical Android device, and some Android features are only available on physical Android devices. Communication with both AVD instances and connected Android devices is handled by the Android Debug Bridge…

While it is tempting to plunge into running the example application created in the previous chapter, it involves using aspects of the Android Studio user interface, which are best described in advance. Android Studio is a powerful and feature-rich development environment that is, to a large extent, intuitive to use. That being said, taking the…

Before the next chapter explores testing on physical Android devices, this chapter will take some time to provide an overview of the Android Studio AVD emulator and highlight many of the configuration features available to customize the environment in both standalone and tool window modes. The Emulator Environment When launched in standalone mode, the emulator…

Although the Android Studio Preview panel allows us to see the layout we are designing, compiling and running an entire app will be necessary to thoroughly test that it works. An Android application may be tested by installing and running it on a physical device or in an Android Virtual Device (AVD) emulator environment. Before…

The preceding chapters of this book have covered the steps necessary to configure an environment suitable for developing Android applications using the Android Studio IDE. Before moving on to slightly more advanced topics, now is a good time to validate that all required development packages are installed and functioning correctly. The best way to achieve…

Before any work can begin on developing an Android application, the first step is to configure a computer system to act as the development platform. This involves several steps consisting of installing the Android Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE), including the Android Software Development Kit (SDK), the Kotlin plug-in, and the OpenJDK Java development environment.…