How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin: A practical guide to developing, testing, and publishing your first Android apps — Second Edition

Building an Android app involves more than getting a screen to appear. You also need to understand how screens connect, how data arrives from the network, and how an app behaves as people use it. This practical Kotlin guide works through those building blocks with guided exercises and app-making activities.

Across four parts, Alex Forrester, Eran Boudjnah, Alexandru Dumbravan, and Jomar Tigcal cover the Android foundations, network calls, data persistence, and the finishing work involved in preparing an app for release. The emphasis is on applying concepts as you go, rather than leaving them as disconnected definitions.

Start with the structure of an Android app

The opening chapters introduce Android Studio, project setup, virtual devices, the Android manifest, and Gradle. From there, the book explores Activity lifecycles, saving and restoring state, Intents, fragments, and navigation. These fundamentals help make sense of how an app’s screens and interactions fit together.

Connect interfaces to data

Later material turns to network requests and common Android development libraries, including Retrofit, Moshi, and Glide. Readers work with REST APIs, JSON responses, remote images, and RecyclerView—useful groundwork for apps that need to retrieve, display, and respond to changing information.

Learn by building, testing, and refining

Exercises and activities give the technical material a practical rhythm. Projects include a planet quiz and a weather app, with further examples involving recipes and movie information. The book also addresses data persistence, app architecture, testing, and publishing, connecting individual features to the broader process of developing an application.

Who will find it useful?

This second edition is for aspiring Android developers and programmers ready to put Kotlin to work in mobile projects. The publisher recommends a basic knowledge of Kotlin—or experience with a similar programming language—so readers can focus on Android development while building on familiar programming concepts.

For a reader looking to move from Kotlin familiarity toward complete Android projects, the guided examples offer a clear place to begin and a practical framework to keep exploring. 📱