Mastering Kotlin for Android 14: Build powerful Android apps using Jetpack libraries, Jetpack Compose, and real-world techniques

Accelerate your Android development journey by mastering the latest Kotlin techniques and libraries to build robust apps with the help of this part-color guide

Key Features

• Apply best practices and industry-essential skills used by Google Developer Experts
• Find out how to publish, monitor, and improve your app metrics on the Google Play Store
• Learn how to debug issues, detect leaks, inspect network calls, and inspect your app’s local database
• Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

Book Description

Written with the best practices, this book will help you master Kotlin and use its powerful language features, libraries, tools, and APIs to elevate your Android apps.

As you progress, you'll use Jetpack Compose and Material Design 3 to build UIs for your app, explore how to architect and improve your app architecture, and use Jetpack Libraries like Room and DataStore to persist your data locally. Using a step-by-step approach, this book will teach you how to debug issues in your app, detect leaks, inspect network calls fired by your app, and inspect your Room database. You'll also add tests to your apps to detect and address code smells.

Toward the end, you’ll learn how to publish apps to the Google Play Store and see how to automate the process of deploying consecutive releases using GitHub actions, as well as learn how to distribute test builds to Firebase App Distribution. Additionally, the book covers tips on how to increase user engagement.

By the end of this Kotlin book, you’ll be able to develop market-ready apps, add tests to their codebase, address issues, and get them in front of the right audience.

What you will learn

• Build beautiful, responsive, and accessible UIs with Jetpack Compose
• Explore various app architectures and find out how you can improve them
• Perform code analysis and add unit and instrumentation tests to your apps
• Publish, monitor, and improve your apps in the Google Play Store
• Perform long-running operations with WorkManager and persist data in your app
• Use CI/CD with GitHub Actions and distribute test builds with Firebase App Distribution
• Find out how to add linting and static checks on CI/CD pipelines

Who this book is for

If you’re an aspiring Android developer or an Android developer working with Java, then this book is for you. Basic Java programming skills are a must if you want to fully utilize the techniques and best practices showcased in this book.

Table of Contents

1. Get Started with Kotlin Android Development
2. Creating Your First Android App
3. Jetpack Compose Layout Basics
4. Design with Material Design 3
5. Architect Your app
6. Network Calls with Kotlin Coroutines
7. Navigating within Your App
8. Persisting Data Locally and Doing Background Work
9. Runtime Permissions
10. Debugging Your App
11. Enhancing Code Quality
12. Testing Your App
13. Publishing Your App
14. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
15. Improving Your App

Harun Wangereka is a Google Developer Expert for Android and an Android engineer with over seven years of experience and currently working at Apollo Agriculture. Harun is passionate about Android development, never tired of learning, building the tech community, and helping other developers upscale their skills. He is a co-organizer at Droidcon Kenya and a former Kotlin Kenya and Android254 co-organizer. Through these communities, he has been able to impact thousands of developers. He is also an Android author at Kodeco where he has written 8 articles, published a book; Saving Data on Android, Second Edition, and is also a video course instructor. He has given numerous sessions on Android and Kotlin across different communities worldwide.