Android development- Understanding the vocabulary

Android development- Understanding the vocabulary

Welcome to my Android series where we'll be talking about all things Android!! In this article, we'll get to see some of the most commonly used words and understand their meaning.

But before we get into that, let's first understand what android is;

Android is an operating system and programming platform for mobile phones and other mobile devices.

It includes an SDK (Software development Kit) that enables the developer to write original code and assemble software modules to create apps for the Android user.

Android development is a whole process. The development process of Android development incudes;

Creating a project

Create your project in android studio and choose your template.

Define your layout

Define your layout for each screen that has User Interface elements.

Write code

Write your code using your preferred programming language

Build and run your app

using the default build configuration you can build and run your app on real and virtual devices.

Testing and debugging

This can be done using the app's logic and User Interface

Publishing of the application

Publish your app in various channels such as Google play.


Now that we're familiar with the development process, let's understand the basic terminologies that are used in android development;


View

This is a rectangular view on the screen. There are different types of views, eg; Image view displays an image, text view displays text.

Resources

Resources are additional files that your code uses such as UI strings, layout definitions, images atc

Recycler view

This is a widget in android you can use to display a list of items.

Packages

They are used to group related program elements such as functions and classes.

Mutable and Immutable objects

Mutable objects can be changed after its created. Immutable objects are objects that cannot be changed after created.

Method

A method is a function defined in a class associated with the behavior of an object instance of the class

List

This is an ordered set of elements that can be accessed by their numeric index in the list. In Kotlin, a list can either be mutable or immutable depending on how it was defined.Mutable lists can be changed in terms of the number of elements, Immutable lists cannot.

Instance

Also called object instance. This is an object created from a class definition.

Hardcoded values

These are values that are directly written into a program.for example, instead of putting strings into your android app source code, you can store the strings in a separate file that collects all the strings for the app. making it easier to change and translate them.

Gradle

This is a tool used by Android studio to automate and manage the build process for your app. It takes the source code,along with the platform code ,libraries and resources and assembles all the parts into an APK that can be installed and run on an android device.

Exception

An exception is an event, which occurs during the execution of a program, that disrupts the normal flow of the program's instructions

Empty string

An empty string is a string of zero length, represented as ""

Double

This is a basic data type to represent decimal numbers in Kotlin.

Conditional statements

These are statements that determine the control flow of a program based on the boolean outcome of an evaluation

Class

A class is like a blueprint for an object. A class defines properties that are common to all objects described in the class, as well as actions for these objects. A class is defined using the class keyword in Kotlin.

Android Application Package (APK)

This is the package file format Android uses to distribute and install mobile applications. Android studio can help you create APK's for your app.

Android Virtual Device (AVD)

This is a configuration that defines a specific android device that you want to simulate in an android emulator

Android Emulator

An android emulator simulates an Android device on your computer.

Adaptive icons

This is an app icon format for android apps which can display a variety of shapes across different device models. It's intention is to make all the app icons have a uniform shape on a device.


I hope you enjoyed reading this :) See you in the next article