As the Android ecosystem grows, Android platform solutions and libraries have evolved with it. In this post, you’ll learn about design patterns, architecture, and essential solutions for Android and how they have evolved over Android’s long history. Next, you’ll design the user interface by creating XML layout files and adding various UI components such as buttons, text views, and images.
However, understanding the overall Android platform architecture will definitely help you to build better Android applications. Every Android project must have an AndroidManifest.xml file which describes essential information about the application such as the package name, entry points, components, permissions, and metadata. Here is the list of items that you are going to need when developing Android applications. Please note that this is an exhaustive list, and you don’t need to know it all from the get-go.
MVI
Stream is proudly designed, built and continually enhanced in Boulder, CO, and Amsterdam, NL; with a global remote team. Again, don’t be intimidated by the amount of information on this roadmap. This project includes a demo project which shows the roadmap image. We have also listed down some free resources which you can use for the items listed in the image above. Also, you don’t need to go through all of them, just go through them and pick what you like. For the languages, you can develop Android apps either by using Kotlin or Java.
You can also manipulate the network responses by attaching a CallAdapter, which allows you to handle the raw responses and model the response types to your desired types. For more information about this, check out Modeling Retrofit Responses With Sealed Classes and Coroutines. We’ve already discussed RxJava before in the Design Patterns section.
Activities
Gradle is a build automation tool used in Android development to manage project dependencies, compile source code, package resources, and generate APK files. Dependencies refer to external code resources that an Android project relies on. They can include libraries, plugins, or other code modules required by the application to function properly. XML (Extensible Markup Language) has been the traditional approach for building Android app interfaces. It is a markup language that uses a hierarchical structure to define the layout and appearance of user interfaces.
To reduce that time, asynchronous programming provides efficient validation of the data state. The View draws the components of the UI, which the user can interact with. A ViewGroup acts as a container for the Views and other ViewGroup objects, as shown in the image above. The best way to understand an activity is to look at an app screen.
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Google also supports many Jetpack libraries integrations and compatibilities, such as ViewModelScope and LifecycleScope, you gain many advantages if you choose coroutines as a concurrency solution. MVI (Model-View-Intent) is also a popular architecture in modern Android development since Jetpack Compose has brought declarative programming to our lives. Software design pattern is a reusable solution to solve repeated and common software problems in software engineering.
So in this article, we are going to discuss all these things in detail. One of the more powerful APIs in the Java API framework is Android Jetpack, which is pushed by Google. Jetpack accelerates development speed by reducing boilerplate code so that developers can focus on the code they care about. Android Runtime (ART) is an application Runtime System used by Android OS and one of the core features in the Android ecosystem. ART was invented to replace the Dalvik virtual machine for devices running Android version 5.0 (Lollipop) or higher.
Learn the paradigm of asynchronous programming
Luckily there are solutions to execute computationally heavy business work without blocking the main thread, and they make it possible not to need to handle each thread manually one by one. As you may have noticed, this is the maximized combination of the SOLID design principles. MVI works on top of the other patterns, such as MVP or MVVM, with state management mechanisms, which means MVI architecture can bring the Presenter or ViewModel concepts depending on your architectural design.
- Jetpack Compose, on the other hand, is a modern UI toolkit introduced by Google.
- It was initially designed for the JVM environment and combines functional and object-oriented programming.
- Room is an Android Jetpack library by Google, which provides an abstraction layer over SQLite that simplifies querying and accessing the database without complicated SQL statements.
- Initially, as a beginner, if you get overwhelmed with so many concepts then don’t be afraid and stop learning.
- However, those libraries require a lot of boilerplate code and do not support Android platform compatibility, such as connectivity features, security support, and DNS (Domain Name System) resolution.
- If you want to explore an open-source project built with MVI architecture and design patterns discussed above, check out WhatsApp Clone Compose on GitHub.
It’s essential to regularly evaluate the roadmap’s relevance and feasibility, considering external factors, feedback, and evolving priorities. While roadmaps provide a valuable framework, it is ultimately up to individuals and organizations to assess and determine whether following the roadmap aligns with their goals and circumstances. However, it’s important to recognize that roadmaps are not set in stone and can be subject to change. Flexibility and adaptability are crucial, as unforeseen events or new information may require adjustments along the way. I have already created an Android development roadmap video on my youtube channel where I have described every topic in detail.
Below is the broken-down version of the roadmap, with links and resources to learn more about each of the items listed in the complete roadmap above. Before exploring the Jetpack libraries, let’s discuss the recommended app architecture by Google. Tabs navigate to different https://wizardsdev.com/en/vacancy/android-developer/ screens when users touch a menu, and you can combine swipeable behaviors with ViewPager. For more information, check out the Create swipe views with tabs using ViewPager guide. In this section, we’ve discussed the fragment and how to create various types of fragments.
The last step we’re going to cover is the basics of how you can manage your application build. At the most basic level, Google now advocates single activity apps where different screens are loaded as content within the same activity. Retrofit is a type-safe REST client for Android, which aims to make it easier to consume RESTful web services. Retrofit makes it easy to consume JSON or XML data which are parsed into Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs).