Social Media Aggregator Android App

We have seen the power of Kotlin for Spring Boot. However, building a mobile application is different. It's much more compact compared to browser apps, they have to be delivered fast. It has to be 10 times faster in terms of processing user input.

Kotlin's features along with its compiler's support for the Android app development makes developing Android apps much easier, interesting, and productive. The biggest advantage of using Kotlin is its Null Safety feature. NullPointerException is the foe for any Android apps and is a nightmare for developers. Kotlin simply kills the possibility of NullPointerException. It also has a robust API also. Apart from Null Safety Kotlin has features such as extension function, Lambdas, delegated properties, and functions such as let, apply, with, and when. All this makes Android app development so much fun. The Kotlin team have built an Anko library, which is also loaded with lots of features. Anko is one more reason to love Kotlin.

Kotlin is a great language and the best way to learn any language is by gaining practical knowledge. In this chapter, you will learn to create a social media aggregator app along with Kotlin's features. You will learn to apply Kotlin in the Android way.

In this chapter, you will learn:

• How to start an activity
• Dealing with preferences
• Model classes
• RecyclerView, adapters, and click events
• String interpolation
• Functions such as let, apply, with, when, and so on

We will be referencing classes and files we have created for the companion app. Make sure while reading you have the source code handy.