Smashing Android UI

Chapter 5: Android App Structure and Online Guidelines

This chapter introduces terms and technical concepts used later in this book. This chapter gives you an overview of the Android app structure, general components used to build an app, overview of the development processes, and available online documentation. The goal of this chapter is to make sure that you understand the terms used in the following chapters but not to teach you Android development from the ground up.

If you are familiar with the Android platform already you can skip this chapter or skim through it.

Android app structure overview

This section gives you an overview of how Android apps are structured. Understanding some of the concepts discussed later requires you to understand the technical concepts at some level. The level of required understanding depends on whether you are a designer wanting to learn about designing for the platform or you are a developer implementing designs. For a designer, the level of understanding that this section provides is most likely enough. Developers should also look at more technical books for a deeper understanding of each of these topics.

The Android app structure is well defined, and the app framework supports developers very well as long as they build the apps as intended. The Android platform is much stricter about the way components should be used than many older platforms.

Android app basic building blocks

The Android app is assembled from a set of ready components ...