Introduction

It's been so long since my first article, but I'm committing to posting more regularly.

This article introduces the Android Development Fundamentals series, a documentation of my path as an Android developer. I hope this series also helps beginners like me to understand the fundamentals without feeling overwhelmed by the information available, especially from the updates that drastically change the way things are done.

Who This Series Is For

This series is for beginners in Android Development, not for beginners in programming, so at least the basics of Kotlin are necessary.

I don't plan to write articles introducing Kotlin (yet), so if you don't know Kotlin, I recommend learning it on your own from a course, book, etc. The official documentation is a good starting point. Come back when you learn what a class, data class, lambda and higher-order function, List, MutableList are.

Topics and Methodology

First I'll cover the Android system architecture and the main components of apps. Then we'll introduce Jetpack Compose, its basic composables and modifiers, recomposition concept, navigation, tests, API requests, storage... you know, the fundamentals you probably saw in a roadmap before landing here.

For each article, I want to be more practical, so I'll give just enough theory at the start of the articles, then we'll build a small project from that and integrate the rest of the theory in a more natural way. Practicing, committing mistakes, and solving them is more efficient, so let me warn you that you're going to find errors not mentioned in the articles during your implementations. I encourage you to read the error messages, search for them to understand what is going on and solve them.

The source code of all projects will be available on my GitHub, so feel free to explore it. The link to the repository and my references will be at the end of my articles.

Asking Questions

If something is confusing or not clear in the article, feel free to ask, but first, I recommend you try to find it by yourself. This is an important skill for developers, especially in the AI era. Sometimes we ask questions that already have answers and can be found with a quick Google. Beginners tend to do that because they don't even know about that, so I want to make sure you develop this skill early.

I'm not saying you cannot ask questions and try to solve everything alone, I'm just saying that you should at least check if someone else had the same problem (99% of the cases the answer is yes). I recommend reading this article for better understanding.

AI is also a great tool, but be careful when using it. AI commits mistakes in a confident way — the more you know about the topic, the more you can spot the lies — so at least complement the answer with parallel research.

Final Words

I hope this series helps you learn Android development, and I will do my best to write clear, concise articles and readable code.

See you in the next article, subscribe and tell me in the comments why you chose to learn Android Development in the first place.

EOF