Building Android UIs with Custom Views

Creating a binary artifact

We've been talking about shared custom views and Android libraries as if they were the same. The most suitable way to share a custom view is as an Android library. The main difference between an Android application and an Android library is that the latter cannot be run by itself on a device or emulator and will only produce an .aar file. This .aar file can, later on, be added as a dependency in an Android application project or other libraries. We could also have sub-modules inside the same project and have dependencies between them. To see how this works, we'll convert a custom view project into an Android library and we'll add a test application project to quickly test it.

First, once we have an Android application, ...