Mobile Development with Android

Since 2019 Kotlin has been designated as the official programming language for Android development. However, Kotlin can be used for more than just mobile application development. Kotlin supports server-side development, full-stack development, data science, native application development, and multiplatform development. Kotlin compiles to Java bytecode, runs on the Java Virtual Machine, and can interoperate with existing Java code in your projects. In this course, you will be introduced to the Kotlin programming language. You will discover various use cases for Kotlin and identify when you would choose to use Kotlin over Java. You will use the Kotlin online playground to write your first bit of code, run Kotlin on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and compile Kotlin code to JavaScript. Next, you will use the Kotlin command line compiler on your local machine and run the Kotlin REPL (read-evaluate-print-loop) interactive environment to work with Kotlin code. Finally, you will install the IntelliJ integrated development environment to work with Kotlin and create and run your first Kotlin project.

Kotlin supports the same basic concepts as other high-level programming languages such as Java and C#. However, Kotlin has a unique, more concise syntax than these languages and also has some additional features which make programming in Kotlin more robust and secure. In this course, you will learn to work with basic Kotlin data types and syntax. You will explore how to make a choice between val-type variables and var-type variables and the details of how to use those in your code. You will also use string templates to evaluate expressions embedded in strings. Next, you will work with conditional branching using if-else statements and expressions. You will perform multiple conditional checks using when statements and expressions, work with collection data structures such as lists, sets, and maps, and use looping constructs such as for-loops, while loops, and do-while loops. Finally, you will explore null safety features in Kotlin such as null-safe invocations, not-null assertions, and the Elvis operator.

Kotlin supports functional and object-oriented programming constructs. Functions in Kotlin are first-class citizens and function objects can be treated just like other data types. In addition, Kotlin supports very concise function expressions called lambdas that are very often used with collection-related operations. In this course, you will learn the structure, syntax, and features of basic functions in Kotlin. You will learn to define default values for function input parameters, use named and positioned parameters with functions, and create functions with variable numbers of arguments. Next, you will work with higher-order functions. You will learn to pass in functions as input arguments to other functions and return functions as return values from functions. You will also implement and use closures in your code. Finally, you will define and use lambda expressions which are short, concise function definitions for use and throw functions. You will learn how to use the trailing lambda syntax in Kotlin and practice creating and using lambda expressions with collections.

A core feature of Kotlin is its ability to interoperate with Java code. Classes and objects in Kotlin are built on the same principles as in Java but Kotlin has additional features that improve upon Java's object-oriented model, including the ability to implement enum classes, sealed classes, data classes, and extension functions for third-party classes. In this course, you will be introduced to classes and objects in Kotlin. You will learn to define and use primary constructors, secondary constructors, and initializer blocks. You will also see how you can define custom getters and setters for class properties. Next, you will learn how you can inherit from classes in Kotlin and implement interfaces. You will study the implementation and use of functional interfaces and other special classes that Kotlin supports, such as enum classes, sealed classes, data classes, and companion objects. Finally, you will see how you can use extension functions to extend third-party class functionality and use coroutines for asynchronous programming.

Android application development remains highly relevant due to the widespread use of Android devices and the increasing demand for mobile applications. With the growing reliance on smartphones and tablets for various tasks, from communication and entertainment to productivity and e-commerce, Android apps play a vital role in meeting the evolving needs and preferences of users. In this course, you will embark on a journey to explore the essential concepts of Android development. You will learn about the four crucial components of Android applications - activities, services, broadcast receivers, and content providers. You will grasp the significance of the Android manifest file and gain familiarity with the fundamental architectural principles that will govern the development of robust Android applications. Next, you will learn how to set up and install Android Studio. You will create and configure an Android Views project and you will recognize the importance of selecting the appropriate Android API level to ensure compatibility and maximize the potential of your application. By exploring the various directories and folders within an Android project, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of their roles and functions. Finally, you will dive into the practical aspects of Android development by creating an Android Virtual Device (AVD) within Android Studio. This AVD will enable you to execute and evaluate your applications directly within the development environment. You will run your first application, fine-tune the layout, and manipulate the included resources, providing you with hands-on experience in developing apps using Android Studio.

Views and layouts are essential in Android applications as they determine the visual presentation, user interaction, and overall user experience, enabling developers to create intuitive and visually appealing interfaces that adapt to different device sizes and orientations. In this course you will learn the basics of using layouts or ViewGroups to design your application's screen. You will create screens using TextViews, EditText widgets, and ImageViews. Next, you will improve the look and feel of your application by including a MaterialToolbar to display the app title and other actions. You will also see how you can incorporate and wire up a floating action button in your app. Furthermore, you will explore listeners in more detail by developing a simple counter application that also includes a Snackbar for notifications. Finally, you will expand your skills in Android app development by exploring different layout options, including the linear, relative, frame, and constraint layouts.

Interactive dynamic layouts such as GridView and ListView in Android enable developers to present data in a visually appealing and interactive manner. These views leverage adapters as a bridge between the data source and the layout, allowing for improved performance using view recycling. In this course, we will create dynamic views using GridView and ListView layouts. We learn how to recycle views within the layouts, optimizing performance and memory usage by reusing existing views. Furthermore, we will explore formatting the layouts to utilize cards, enhancing the visual presentation of the content. Next, we will explore a variety of commonly used widgets in mobile applications. We will create an autocomplete text view, providing users with suggestions and auto-completion functionality for efficient input. We'll also create multi-autocomplete text views, empowering users to select multiple suggestions. We will also incorporate a ScrollView to allow users to navigate and view content that extends beyond the screen size. Finally, we will incorporate a toggle switch into our app, allowing users to easily switch between two states or options. We will create a ListView with checkboxes, enabling users to select multiple items from a list. Additionally, we will utilize the toggle button for state selection and create a screen with a popup menu, providing users with a visually organized menu of options or actions.

Intents, activities, and fragments are essential components in Android development as they enable seamless navigation between screens, facilitate modular and reusable code structures, and allow for efficient communication and data transfer within an Android application. In this course, we will begin by exploring the functionality of intents in Android applications. Through hands-on exercises, we will learn to navigate between activities using intents, incorporating both implicit and explicit intents. We will also leverage intents to direct users to external web pages, enhancing the flow and navigation within our applications. Next, we will delve into advanced techniques in Android app development. We will set up the user interface for a reservations app and utilize intents to navigate to the reservations page, implementing view manipulation code to accept and display reservations. We will create view binding objects to streamline the process of accessing views. Additionally, we will use data binding to specify data directly within XML layouts for seamless integration. Then we will enhance list handling capabilities by leveraging RecyclerView. Finally, we will modularize our app by dividing it into fragments and pass input arguments to fragments for customization. We will learn to dynamically add and replace fragments using the fragment manager and fragment transactions and explore backstack management, enabling smooth back navigation within our app. To facilitate effective communication between activities and fragments, we will utilize ViewModel architecture, enhancing data exchange and interaction.

Final Exam: Kotlin Fundamentals will test your knowledge and application of the topics presented throughout the Kotlin Fundamentals track.

Jetpack Compose is a modern toolkit for building user interfaces (UIs) in Android applications. Its relevance lies in its ability to simplify UI development, improve code maintainability, and provide a more flexible and interactive user experience in Android apps. In this course, you will dive into Android Jetpack Compose, learning how to think in Compose and designing UI components as functions that describe their appearance and behavior. Next, you will explore the life cycle of composables and how to organize and compose UI elements effectively. Then you will discover the practical aspects of setting up a Compose project and running the emulator. You will configure a development environment and create a new Compose project using Android Studio. Finally, you will run a composable app and preview it using the Android Studio preview pane. You will apply themes and customize the appearance of your UI elements, ensuring a consistent and visually appealing design. By the end of the course, you will have the knowledge and skills to create UI components using Android Jetpack Compose.

In Jetpack Compose, layouts define the structure of user interface (UI) elements, allowing for flexible and dynamic UI design, while state management involves handling the data that drives the UI, ensuring that the UI responds to user interactions appropriately. In this course, you will go beyond the basics of Android Jetpack Compose, learning how to customize screens using the versatile column and row composables to arrange UI elements. Next, you will use the image composable to incorporate images seamlessly into your Compose app and implement scrolling functionality within a column or a row. Then you will explore managing state in Compose, focusing on the remember function and creating interactive UI components, such as drop-down menus and sliders. Finally, you will hoist state to enhance state access and reusability and you will integrate LiveData and ViewModel with Compose, to manage and share data effectively. At the end of this course, you will be able to develop complex and interactive user screens to display your app's content.

Lazy composables in Jetpack Compose enable efficient rendering and scrolling of large lists or grids. Navigation in Jetpack Compose provides a powerful way to navigate between different screens or destinations within an app. Together, lazy composables and navigation enhance the user experience by enabling seamless scrolling and smooth transitions between screens in Jetpack Compose apps. In this course, you will learn how to efficiently display large lists of items using the lazy column and preserve their state across screen rotations or app restarts. Next, you will explore the lazy grid, and with the help of the coil library, you will asynchronously load images in your Compose app. Then you will set up the NavController and NavHost and define the structure and connections between different screens. You will also examine advanced techniques for passing data between composables and querying data from the data layer. Finally, you will test your app on a real Android device and implement navigation using the bottom navigation bar. When you are finished with this course you will have the skills and ability to develop multiscreen applications using Jetpack Compose.

Gestures in Jetpack Compose allow developers to handle user interactions such as taps, scrolls, and drags. Additionally, animations in Jetpack Compose empower developers to bring user interface (UI) elements to life by adding dynamic transitions, effects, and visual enhancements. In this course, you will explore the preferred techniques to handle gestures using built-in gesture handling available on specific composables. By utilizing gesture modifiers, you will be able to detect and respond to tap gestures, implement smooth scrolling behavior for UI components, and create interactive and draggable elements. Additionally, you will implement swipe-to-dismiss functionality. Next, you will dive into animated visibility effects and apply slide, scale, expand, and shrink effects to UI elements. Finally, you will explore advanced animation techniques and learn how to smoothly transition between different states using animated content, create animated counters with fluid motion, and seamlessly cross-fade between different screens. When you're finished with this course you will have the toolkit for creating rich and interactive animations in Compose, with visually engaging elements.

Networking is crucial for real-world Android apps to enable seamless communication between the apps and external services, such as remote servers, databases, and application programming interfaces (APIs). Networking allows applications to store data in a persistent manner on remote servers and access this data in a well-designed and secure manner. In this course, you will learn the essential aspects of networking operations in Android applications, empowering you to interact with APIs and handle network requests effectively. We will provide an overview of the clients available for accessing REST points and guide you through best practices for accessing the Internet from your app. Next, you will set up and configure an Android Views Project. We will explore the powerful Glide library, which allows you to efficiently load and display images, even in image-heavy applications. Then, we will use real-world APIs to make GET requests using the HTTPUrlConnection client and parse JSON using the Gson library. You will master app architecture structuring, create data and user interface (UI) layers in your app, and implement robust data handling mechanisms. By incorporating coroutines, you will gain proficiency in fetching data from the backend in a more concise and structured manner. By the end of this course, you will have acquired a comprehensive skill set in Android networking, enabling you to create modern apps that interact seamlessly with APIs and deliver dynamic content from the web.

Android offers a built-in standard HttpURLConnection client for making network requests, but it can be cumbersome and involve boilerplate code for handling responses and errors. In contrast, the Retrofit library simplifies networking by providing a high-level interface, reducing boilerplate, and making application programming interface (API) interactions more concise and efficient. Additionally, using coroutines for background networking operations allows for asynchronous and non-blocking execution, preventing user interface (UI) freezes. In this course, you will learn how to set up and configure a local simple HTTP server to handle requests in your Android application. You will retrieve data from the server, display a list of restaurants, and implement functionality to view individual restaurant details. You will also handle HTTP methods like POST, PUT, and DELETE to add, edit, and remove restaurants, creating a fully functional app with server communication. Next, you will explore the powerful Retrofit library, which streamlines handling HTTP requests in your Android app. You will learn to access REST endpoints more efficiently and reduce boilerplate code, resulting in a cleaner and more maintainable codebase. Finally, you will integrate the Retrofit client with Compose, a modern Android UI toolkit, to build a seamless user interface.

Various methods can be used for persisting data locally in an Android device. App-specific files and preferences offer a lightweight and straightforward approach for storing small amounts of data, such as user settings and preferences. SQLite databases and the Room API provide a robust and efficient solution for more structured and organized data. This enables data persistence for larger datasets with powerful querying capabilities and data manipulation operations. In this course, you will learn the essential aspects of data and file storage on Android. Through hands-on practice, you will build a simple app that stores recipes locally using app-specific files. Next, you will work with storing and retrieving shared preferences, a simple yet effective method to store key-value pairs in Android. Using shared preferences, you will build features to track and utilize recently searched items and prefill forms in your app. Finally, you learn to store app details in a local SQLite database, retrieve and modify data using the SQLite API, and later connect to SQLite using the Room API.

Integrating Android apps with Firebase offers a seamless and secure solution for managing user sign-in and registration processes while enabling real-time data synchronization. Firebase Authentication provides a range of authentication methods, including email, phone number, and social media logins. Firestore serves as a scalable NoSQL cloud database, allowing developers to store and retrieve data in real-time, ensuring dynamic content delivery to users. In this course, you will learn how to integrate Android applications with Firebase. You will discover Firebase's diverse services as we build a restaurant reservation app. You will implement user authentication and explore real-time data storage using Cloud Firestore. Next, you will set up strings, styles, and themes to create a visually appealing and consistent user interface (UI). You will see how dependency injection enhances code maintainability and testability, and you will integrate the Hilt Framework for efficient dependency injection that simplifies access to the Firebase backend. Finally, you will explore advanced concepts in Android app development. Mastering login and signup flows will create a secure and user-friendly app. You will set up a navigation drawer and top bar for app navigation and manage app screens and data using View Models. By the end of the course, you will integrate all these components to create a complete application with a cloud backend.

Final Exam: Building Android Apps with Jetpack Compose will test your knowledge and application of the topics presented throughout the Building Android Apps with Jetpack Compose track.