As the year 2019 drew to a close, Android ran on 51.8 percent of all smartphones in the United States and on 85 percent of all smartphones worldwide.1,2 The Google Play Store had 2.57 million apps compared with only 1.84 million in Apple's App Store.3
Today, Android is everywhere, and experts predict that Android will dominate the global smartphone market for years to come.4 So, if you read this book in a public place (on a commuter train, at the beach, on the dance floor at the Coyote Ugly saloon), you can read proudly, with a chip on your shoulder and with your chest held high. Android is hot stuff, and you’re cool because you’re reading about it.
You can attack this book in either of two ways. You can go cover to cover, or you can poke around from one chapter to another. You can even do both (start at the beginning and then jump to a section that particularly interests you). In this book, the basic topics come first, and the more involved topics follow the basics. You may already be comfortable with some basics, or you may have specific goals that don’t require you to know about certain topics.
The best advice is as follows:
Almost every technical book starts with a little typeface legend, and this book is no exception. What follows is a brief explanation of the typefaces used in this book:
computerese
font for Kotlin code, filenames, web page addresses (URLs), onscreen messages, and other such things. Also, if something you need to type is really long, it appears in computerese
font on its own line (or lines).public void Anyname
which means that you type public void and then some name that you make up on your own. Words that you need to replace with your own words are set in italicized computerese
.
This book makes a few assumptions about you, the reader. If one of these assumptions is incorrect, you're probably okay. If all these assumptions are incorrect … well, buy the book anyway.
The assumptions are as follows:
You have some programming experience (maybe not a lot). This book should be interesting for experienced programmers, yet accessible to people who don’t write code for a living. If you’re a programming guru, that’s great. If you’re a certified Linux geek, that’s great, too. But no one expects you to be able to recite the names of Kotlin’s concurrency primitives in your sleep, or pipe together a chain of 14 Linux commands without reading the documentation.
By the way, if you have no experience with an object-oriented language, you can get some. Your favorite bookstore has a terrific book titled Java For Dummies, 7th Edition, by Barry Burd (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.). The book comes highly recommended.
Throughout this book, an icon in the margin marks the beginning of a little detour — a fact or tidbit that stands out for one reason or another. The paragraphs marked by icons differ in their degree of importance. Some are valuable reading, others are silly trivia, and many are somewhere in the middle.
What kinds of icons do you find in this book? Here’s a list:
Answer: A Remember icon.
You’ve read the Android All-in-One book, seen the Android All-in-One movie, worn the Android All-in-One T-shirt, and eaten the Android All-in-One candy. What more is there to do?
That’s easy. Just visit this book’s website — www.allmycode.com/Android
. At the website, you can find updates, comments, additional information, and lots of downloadable code. (You can also get there by visiting www.dummies.com
and searching for Android Application Development All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition.
Also on this book’s page at www.dummies.com
is the Cheat Sheet, which provides you with hints you need for nearly every Android app, such as parts of an Android app and the contents of that all important .apk
file. You also get quick reminders about navigation classes, parts of a notification, and user interface elements.
If you've gotten this far, you’re ready to start reading about Android application development. Think of us (this book's authors) as your guides, your hosts, your personal assistants. We do everything we can to keep things interesting and, most important, help you understand.
If you experience any problems at all with this book, please contact either or both of us: Barry ([email protected]
) or John ([email protected]
) for assistance. We want you to be truly happy with your purchase and will help in any way we can with book-specific questions. You can also contact Barry on Twitter (@allmycode
) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/allmycode
).
Occasionally, we have updates to our technology books. If this book does have technical updates, they will be posted at this book’s page at www.dummies.com
and at http://allmycode.com/android
.
www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held-by-smartphone-platforms-in-the-united-states/
.https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/operating-systems-market-share/#gref
.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/
.www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os
.18.217.108.11