Just like Chapter 3, Building a GUI, this chapter is a hands-on guide. Indeed, we will once again pass through many code samples and see their corresponding screenshots.

This chapter will enhance your graphical interfaces by letting you play with images, splash screen, and playing songs. You certainly know that most of the applications in the Android market do have these features. While offering the same basic functionalities that other apps provide can be a good enough reason to master these aspects of building graphical interfaces, there is another—and much better—reason: building your brand.

There is an incredible number of applications out here. According to AppBrain.com statistics, there are 877,743 applications in the Android market at the time of writing (December 2015) and 78% of them are likely to be useful, meaning that they offer good features and are downloaded by users. If you want your apps to be successful in this jungle, you'd better build a strong brand image for yourself. While we will talk about monetizing our application and pushing it to the market in the last two chapters of this book, the first step is to make your application recognizable by customers using a logo, a splash screen, and playing audio.