Chapter 1. Getting Started: Diving In

Android has taken the world by storm.
Everybody wants a smartphone or tablet, and Android devices are hugely popular. In this book, we’ll teach you how to develop your own apps, and we’ll start by getting you to build a basic app and run it on an Android Virtual Device. Along the way, you’ll meet some of the basic components of all Android apps, such as activities and layouts. All you need is a little Java know-how...
Welcome to Androidville
Android is the world’s most popular mobile platform. At the last count, there were over one billion active Android devices worldwide, and that number is growing rapidly.
Android is a comprehensive open source platform based on Linux and championed by Google. It’s a powerful development framework that includes everything you need to build great apps using a mix of Java and XML. What’s more, it enables you to deploy those apps to a wide variety of devices—phones, tablets and more.
So what makes up a typical Android app?
We’re going to build our Android apps using a mixture of Java and XML. We’ll explain things along the way, but you’ll need to have a fair understanding of Java to get the most out of this book.
Layouts define what each screen looks like
A typical Android app is comprised of one or more screens. You define what each screen looks like using a layout to define its appearance. Layouts are usually defined ...
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