Android Application Development All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4

Examining a Basic Android App

IN THIS CHAPTER

Finding your app’s activities, layouts, menus, and other stuff

Assigning names to things

Choosing API levels

In Chapter 3 of this minibook, you run Android Studio to create a skeletal Android app. The skeletal app doesn’t do much, but the app has all the elements you need for getting started with Android. You get a basic activity (a screen full of stuff for the user to look at). You get an elementary layout for your activity. You get an icon or two, and a little text thingy that says Hello World! You can even run the new app on an emulator or on a real Android device.

Unfortunately, this skeletal app contains many, many parts. Your platform likely has a quick way to check how many. For example, on a Windows platform, you can right click the MyFirstApp project folder in File Explorer and choose Properties from the context menu. The General tab tells you how many files and folders MyFirstApp contains. The test system used to create that example shows a whopping 1,459 files and 417 different directories. All this just to display Hello World! on a mobile device's small screen!

So before you plunge headlong into Android development, ...